I spent the last few months building a web extraction API. Here's what surprised me most: developers don't need another scraper. They need extraction that stops breaking.

Every web scraping thread I read has the same arc:

Write a BeautifulSoup/Scrapy scraper

It works for two weeks

The target site changes one div

Scraper breaks at 2am

Dev swears, rewrites selectors

Repeat

The alternative everyone reaches for next: "I'll use Playwright. No, I'll use Puppeteer. No, a headless browser with proxy rotation. No..."

But here's the thing most people miss: the problem isn't fetching. It's parsing.

The extraction-first approach

At Haunt API (which I built), we flipped the model. Instead of fetch-then-parse, the user describes what they want in plain English: "Extract product name, price, and stock status from this page."

The AI reads the page like a human would — it understands context, not CSS selectors.…