Pierre de Wulf Built ScrapingBee by Selling Web Scraping Infrastructure as an API

Turning a Developer's Recurring Operational Burden into an API Business

Pierre de Wulf built ScrapingBee, a web scraping API service, together with Kevin Sahin. The product handles the browser runs and proxy management needed to collect data from web pages on the customer's behalf. An interview published in April 2022 presented it as a case that had reached $1 million in ARR, and attention focused on the fact that the two co-founders had grown it after an earlier business failed.

The Problem They Found While Building a Price Tracking Service

Before ScrapingBee, the two ran ShopToList, a consumer price tracking browser extension. It let users save products they were interested in and check for price changes, but the user base and the revenue structure did not line up. Looking back later, Pierre explained that reaching break-even would have required far more users than they had actually acquired.

Their next product, PricingBot, was a competitor price tracking tool for ecommerce operators. They expected selling to business customers to make monetization easier, but it failed to grow enough over about nine months. The two had not understood the ecommerce industry's circumstances, where its customers gathered, or what actually motivated a purchase. They sold PricingBot and decided that their next product would target customers they knew well.

The third party scraping tools they used while building PricingBot became the clue for the new business. Pierre was unhappy with the speed and performance of the existing tools and judged that there was room to improve in a market where paid businesses already existed. Both were developers, and Kevin had even written a book about web scraping, so this time they could understand the customer's work and frustrations directly.

Turning Browser and Proxy Operations into a Product

A ScrapingBee user sends the web page address to be collected and the needed options to the API. The service processes JavaScript with a headless browser, manages proxies, and returns the page content or the extracted data. It can be used for work that requires repeatedly gathering information across many websites, such as product prices, search results, or job postings. Customers reduce the burden of running collection infrastructure themselves and connect the data they obtain to their own products or work.

The revenue model bundles API credits and a concurrent request limit into a monthly subscription fee. Credit consumption varies with the features a request needs, so work that costs more to process is charged more usage. In the official documentation checked in September 2026, for example, a basic request using a standard proxy is 1 credit, including JavaScript rendering is 5 credits, and using a premium proxy together with rendering is 25 credits. In this structure, both the number of requests and the processing difficulty shape the customer's choice of plan.

The early product was given to about 10 free trial users recruited from scraping forums and related communities. In June 2019 they ended the free trial and told users they would need a subscription to keep using it. The first payment arrived 50 minutes after the first notice email went out, giving them a signal that there was real willingness to pay for a tool still in development.

Winning Customers Through Search and Gaining Room with Outside Capital

Technical content paid off early in customer acquisition. A guide published in August 2019 on solving web scraping blocking was shared in several places and quickly brought in about 20,000 visitors. An article that explained in detail a problem developers were trying to solve right then became a channel for publicizing the product.

They also used the product's usage volume for user interviews. Offering 10,000 API calls to anyone who would spend 15 minutes talking about their scraping requirements let them talk to about 100 people in under three months. By giving people a reason to agree to an interview, they quickly collected customers' real purposes and frustrations.

In the spring of 2020 they joined TinySeed's second accelerator program and took outside investment. TinySeed is a program that provides capital, mentoring, and a founder community while emphasizing founder control and capital-efficient growth. ScrapingBee has the character of a small SaaS that grew by combining co-founding with investor support.

In a later interview Pierre emphasized the psychological room the investment created. Even though they did not directly spend the money they raised, having enough cash let them step out of a situation where they feared small expenses and postponed decisions. He recalled that the expert advice, mentoring, and connections to fellow founders that came with the investment were also important support.

As they grew, Kevin took marketing and Pierre took product and technology, dividing the roles. For content production they brought in developers who could write and built a system where an editor polished the sentences and structure. Pierre described the publishing pace at the time as about three to four pieces a month, and they accumulated in-depth tutorials by language, framework, and library. Moving away from the two founders writing every article themselves let them widen their search traffic.

Product improvements focused on reducing friction for developers using it for the first time. In 2020 they added Python and JavaScript SDKs, code examples in seven languages, and an API request builder. It was work to shorten the path from a developer arriving through search to confirming an actual collection result.

From $1 Million to $5 Million in ARR

It took about 18 months to reach $10,000 in MRR, monthly recurring revenue, at the end of 2020. At that level the two founders could take pay similar to their previous jobs, and the business was profitable. Growing to $20,000 in MRR took about three months more, and they actually reached $1 million in ARR in November 2021. The growth story presented in 2022 covers that record, achieved about two and a half years after launch.

In a post published in 2025, Pierre said they had passed $5 million in ARR the previous year, in 2024. At that point the core team was six people: two co-founders, one developer, two customer support staff, and one SEO staff member. They also collaborated with outside freelancers for design, specialized infrastructure work, and content production. So the result came from an operating structure that combined a small full-time staff with outside specialists.

Keeping the team small had a cost as well. In a 2024 interview Pierre said that with few people the burden falls on the co-founders' time and energy, and that handling many tasks at once puts a limit on quality too. He explained that they needed to add people and improve operations even if it meant giving up some profitability. It was hard to judge a founder's real workload from high revenue and a low headcount alone.

The Operational Cleanup That Made the Sale Possible

The sale preparations also exposed risks peculiar to a web scraping business. According to Pierre, while the first sale process was under way they received a notice from a large tech company demanding that they stop scraping and had to halt the deal. Before trying again they worked on additional hiring, standardizing work, documenting operations, and tidying up accounting records. Beyond product performance and revenue, a buyer needed an operating system and risk response they could review.

Behind the two founders' decision to sell were fatigue from working in the same field for a long time and a shift in life priorities. They added that they wanted to exercise their options while revenue and growth were in good shape. Among several acquisition offers, they chose Oxylabs because it was a business that understood the characteristics and risks of the scraping industry and because the deal was all cash.

On June 19, 2025, TinySeed announced that ScrapingBee had been acquired by the Oxylabs group. The deal was disclosed as an all-cash sale in the eight-figure dollar range, which corresponds to at least $10 million. The exact acquisition price and what each co-founder received are not confirmed in the public materials.

In the sale announcement they said ScrapingBee would continue to operate as a separate product and company, and that Pierre and Kevin would stay with the company. The company described a direction of using the group's infrastructure and expertise to improve performance and add customer support staff. It was a deal that expanded a product built by a small team inside a larger operating organization.

ScrapingBee shows that even a narrow API can grow into a sizable software business if it reduces a customer's recurring operational burden enough. During growth, an easy to use product and steady customer acquisition mattered, and at the sale stage the business's completeness, with operating documentation, accounting, and risk response, was needed. The two founders built up those conditions by adding content production, specialist staff, and investor support on top of their development skills, one after another.