We can’t see what you do with the data, and we like it that way. But we can see the shape of what gets built on top of us, and after a while the same four kinds of person keep showing up at the door. They arrive from very different places and leave with the same thing: a website they needed, turned into an endpoint they can trust.
Indie builders shipping features, not scrapers
The most common visitor is a solo developer or a tiny team who needs one feature backed by real-world data and has zero interest in owning a data pipeline to get it. They want to add “show the top posts,” or “pull this listing’s details,” and get back to building their actual product before the weekend is over.
For them the win is subtraction. A single call to a catalog API replaces a scraper, a cron, a parser, and the future maintenance of all three. The feature ships; the liability never gets created.
Data and ML teams that need a clean feed
The second group cares less about any one request and more about the feed behaving the same way ten thousand times in a row. When rows flow into a warehouse, a model, or an eval set, an unannounced shape change is not an annoyance, it is corrupted training data you find out about far too late.
This is exactly what a versioned contract is for. Pin a version and the fields you ingest today are the fields you ingest next quarter, no matter how many times the source redesigns underneath. The pipeline stops being a thing someone has to watch.
Market and pricing research
The third group lives in spreadsheets and dashboards: analysts tracking prices, availability, listings, sentiment, or events across sources that would each be a separate scraping project. They are not engineers by trade, and they should not have to become one to answer a question about the market.
A hosted API plus a saved, scheduled result turns “go re-run the scrapers” into a table that is simply current whenever they open it. Which is a good moment to mention the second half of that sentence.
Ops and automation
The fourth group is the glue crowd: the people wiring “when this changes over there, do that over here.” Pipe a source into Slack, sync it to a CRM, trip an internal tool when a number moves. Their whole job is connecting systems, and a clean JSON endpoint is the one shape every other system already knows how to accept.
Indie builders
Add a data-backed feature without owning a pipeline.
- A launch page pulling live Hacker News or Reddit
- A side project enriched with details from a listing
- One endpoint instead of a scraper you have to keep
Data & ML teams
A typed, stable feed you can pin and forget.
- Warehouse ingestion with a guaranteed schema
- Training and eval sets that stay reproducible
- No parser to babysit when the source moves
Pricing research
Track a market without becoming an engineer.
- Prices and availability across sources
- Events, listings, and vessels on a schedule
- A dashboard that is simply current on open
Ops & automation
Turn a website into a trigger for everything else.
- Post changes into Slack or email
- Sync a source into a CRM or internal tool
- Clean JSON every other system already accepts
The common thread is not the industry, it is the shape of the problem. Every one of these people had a website with data they needed and no dependable way in. What they build afterward is wildly different. What they needed to start was identical.
If you saw yourself in one of those four, the path in is the same either way. Find your source in the catalog, save and schedule the results as a dataset, or request a new API for a site that is not there yet. The rest is your product.
Started maviapi after one too many 2am scraper fires. Writes about the product, the bets behind it, and the parts of running an API company nobody warns you about.
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