The End of ScrapeForge
This post was supposed to be: Day 6 of building ScrapeForge 🛠️
But unfortunately I have to stop here.
I am genuinely sorry to everyone who followed this journey and supported the project. I can no longer continue building ScrapeForge at this time.
Why I am stopping:
The reason is simple and honest. Lack of funds.
I know this sounds like a common excuse but it is the truth.
Quick recap:
Yesterday I completed around 80% of Instagram profile scraper. After that I started researching deployment options. Until now I had only deployed static or frontend focused apps and had no real experience deploying a production grade backend.
During this research I realized I missed an important detail during the planning phase on Day 2.
ScrapeForge is a complex backend. It is long running stateful and resource intensive. This kind of system cannot run reliably on platforms like Netlify or Vercel. It needs proper cloud infrastructure.
After estimating the costs I realized running ScrapeForge on cloud infrastructure would cost around $150 to $220 per month. With a current budget of $0 this is simply not possible.
At this point I could ask for preorders or investments to fund the project. But that does not feel right to me.
So I have decided to pause ScrapeForge entirely. There will be no further dev logs after this one.
What is next:
For now I am focusing on freelancing to collect funds. I will be building websites and projects and using the skills I gained while building ScrapeForge such as web scraping reverse engineering APIs and building crawlers.
Once I have enough funds I will return to ScrapeForge and continue full time.
If you want ScrapeForge to come back sooner please share this post with anyone who needs a developer or wants data scraped from websites. This would genuinely help me move faster.
Thank you to everyone who followed supported and believed in this journey.
The pairing of 'runs locally' + 'no API keys' is undervalued positioning. It speaks to the technical buyer who has already been burned by SaaS tools that changed pricing, added rate limits, or went down at the wrong moment.
The one-time purchase model makes sense when the tool does a defined job well. What's the job this tool does?
Thank you for sharing this — these end-of-project reflections are really valuable.
One thing I’ve noticed in no-code and low-code tooling is that the hardest validation isn’t just usage, it’s repeatable value signals — not just someone clicking around once, but users coming back and integrating the tool into their workflow.
Often the difference between a project that sticks and one that stagnates isn’t feature count — it’s whether users feel pain sharp enough to change their behavior.
Curious: looking back, was there a specific signal (like repeat engagement, revenue, or a stubborn user complaint) that you wish you had tracked earlier as a stronger indicator of long-term traction?