Gaffa vs Never Drop

Simple REST API

This is the heart of Gaffa's genius. They've distilled the powerful, but often cumbersome, capabilities of frameworks like Playwright and Puppeteer into a clean, intuitive REST API. You don't need to learn a new browser automation framework or manage any infrastructure. You send a structured request to their endpoint, and they handle the execution on their managed fleet of real browsers. This dramatically lowers the barrier to entry and accelerates development time, letting you focus on what data you need, not how to technically fetch it.

Real Browser Automation & JavaScript Rendering

Gaffa doesn't cut corners with simple HTTP requests that fail on modern, dynamic websites. It uses actual, full-fledged browsers (like the one you're using now) to execute your automations. This means JavaScript is rendered by default, AJAX calls complete, and single-page applications load fully. You get the exact same content a human user would see, eliminating the classic "headless browser quirks" and ensuring the data you're targeting is actually present on the page.

Managed Proxies & Global Scaling

They've seamlessly integrated a network of residential proxies into their service. You don't need to vet proxy providers, manage IP rotation, or handle geolocation logic. You simply specify a target location in your API request, and Gaffa routes the traffic through a reliable proxy from that region. Furthermore, their infrastructure is built to scale elastically. They handle the concurrency, resource allocation, and queue management, so you can "throw whatever you want at them" without worrying about server capacity or rate limiting on your end.

Built-in Data Processing & Full Observability

Gaffa goes beyond just fetching raw HTML. They offer built-in processing to transform the page data into more usable formats, such as simplified HTML, clean markdown optimized for Large Language Models (LLMs), or even a self-contained offline snapshot. Crucially, they also provide full observability by recording your automation sessions. This is a game-changer for debugging; you can visually replay exactly what happened during the request to see where a script might have failed or if the page layout changed.

AI-Powered Business Card Scanning

Never Drop utilizes cutting-edge AI-powered Optical Character Recognition (OCR) technology to scan any business card in seconds. This feature instantly extracts critical details, including the contact's name, company, title, phone number, and email, removing the need for tedious manual entry.

Context Enrichment

Gone are the days of generic email addresses. This feature allows users to enrich captured leads by automatically finding verified work emails based on the contact's name and company. This ensures that you never have to guess or waste time searching for accurate contact information.

Personalized AI Drafts

Never Drop's standout feature is its ability to generate personalized follow-up emails based on your conversation context and voice notes. This means you can review and send a tailored email in under two minutes, ensuring that your follow-up feels personal and relevant, not just another generic template.

Team Collaboration and Organization

Designed for fast-paced environments, Never Drop allows teams to organize scans by event and reassign leads among team members. The dashboard provides a comprehensive view of team activity, ensuring everyone stays aligned and no lead falls through the cracks.

Large-Scale Competitive Intelligence & Price Monitoring

For e-commerce businesses or market analysts, manually tracking competitor prices and product catalogs is impossible. Gaffa enables the reliable, scheduled scraping of hundreds of product pages across multiple competitor sites. Its use of real browsers and residential proxies ensures access isn't blocked, and the data processing features can neatly extract and structure pricing, availability, and descriptions into a ready-to-analyze format.

Automated Lead Generation & Data Enrichment

Sales and marketing teams can use Gaffa to automate the collection of public contact information, company details, and news from websites, LinkedIn, and business directories. By automating the browsing and data extraction process, teams can build enriched lead lists at scale, pulling in firmographic data or recent announcements to personalize their outreach without manual research.

Archiving Web Content & Compliance Screenshots

Organizations often need to reliably archive web content for legal compliance, record-keeping, or historical reference. Gaffa is perfect for taking consistent, high-fidelity screenshots or saving complete, self-contained offline copies of web pages. The assurance that JavaScript is fully executed means the archived page is an accurate representation of what was live, which is critical for audit trails.

Feeding LLMs & AI Models with Fresh Web Data

AI and machine learning projects frequently need large, current datasets from the web. Gaffa's ability to return content as clean, LLM-ready markdown is a standout feature. Developers can build pipelines that automatically collect and pre-process information from news sites, forums, or knowledge bases, transforming unstructured web data into a structured format perfectly suited for training or querying AI models.

Trade Shows

When attending trade shows, time is of the essence. Never Drop allows sales teams to efficiently capture leads by scanning business cards, enriching contact profiles, and sending follow-ups while still on the exhibition floor, turning fleeting interactions into lasting connections.

Networking Events

At networking events, the ability to quickly follow up with new contacts can set you apart from competitors. With Never Drop, you can scan, add context, and send personalized emails, ensuring you stay top of mind long after the event has ended.

Conferences

Conferences bring together a multitude of potential leads. Never Drop streamlines the lead-capturing process, allowing you to focus on building relationships rather than worrying about losing contact information. Organizing leads by event helps in effective follow-ups.

Business Dinners

In more intimate settings like business dinners, capturing leads can often be overlooked. Never Drop enables users to document conversations in real-time and follow up promptly, ensuring that important discussions lead to actionable outcomes and future collaborations.

If you've ever tried to build a serious web scraping or automation pipeline, you know the soul-crushing reality: it's a full-time job of fighting bot detection, managing headless browsers, and rotating proxies. Gaffa is the elegant antidote to this infrastructure madness. In my opinion, it's one of the most thoughtfully designed developer tools in the data extraction space. Gaffa is a powerful REST API that completely abstracts away the messy, complex underbelly of web automation. Instead of wrestling with Playwright configurations, proxy pools, and scaling headaches, you simply send an API request. Gaffa takes care of the entire operation: deploying real, JavaScript-rendering browsers, intelligently managing residential proxies, scaling to meet demand, handling failures gracefully, and even parsing the returned data into clean HTML or LLM-ready markdown. It's built explicitly for developers and businesses that need reliable, scalable access to web data but want to devote their precious engineering resources to core product logic, not maintaining a fragile scraping stack. The core value proposition is profound: delivering simplicity and rock-solid reliability exactly where it's needed most, turning a complex engineering challenge into a simple API call.

Never Drop is a groundbreaking lead-capture application tailored for sales teams navigating the hectic environments of trade shows, conferences, and networking events. This tool revolutionizes the traditional approach to lead management by enabling users to effortlessly scan business cards using their smartphones. Once a card is scanned, sales professionals can enhance the gathered data by adding voice notes or textual context about their interactions, ensuring that they capture essential details about each lead. The app's advanced AI technology takes it a step further by drafting personalized follow-up emails in less than two minutes, significantly reducing the chances of losing valuable leads. With seamless integration into popular CRMs like HubSpot, Never Drop guarantees that your sales pipeline remains organized and efficient. Say farewell to lost opportunities and embrace a streamlined follow-up process that transforms leads into closed deals, maximizing your team's productivity and success.

What is a credit and how is it calculated?

Credits are Gaffa's unit of consumption for its API. You are billed credits based on two primary factors: request time and proxy bandwidth. Browser runtime is charged at 1 credit per 30 seconds (or 2 credits per 30 seconds if screen recording is enabled). Additionally, any request that uses a residential proxy (by specifying a proxy_location) consumes 1500 credits per 1GB of bandwidth used. Each successful request deducts the corresponding credits from your monthly plan allowance.

Does Gaffa offer a free trial?

Yes, absolutely. You can sign up for a free account and immediately begin using the full Gaffa API to build and test automations. The key point is that the free tier allows you to run your automations exclusively on Gaffa's dedicated demo site (demo.gaffa.dev). This lets you experiment with all features, understand the API response format, and build your scripts without any cost before upgrading to a paid plan to run on the open web.

What is your refund policy?

Gaffa offers a straightforward refund policy. If you request a refund before using any credits within your current billing cycle (month), they will be happy to issue one. This policy is designed to be fair and low-risk for new users who may find the service isn't a fit shortly after subscribing, provided they haven't consumed resources.

Do unused credits roll over to the next month?

No, credits do not roll over. The credit allowances included in your monthly subscription plan (Starter, Startup, Growth) are reset at the start of each new billing cycle. Any credits you do not use by the end of the month are forfeited. This is a common model in utility-based APIs and encourages efficient planning of your automation workloads.

What is Never Drop?

Never Drop is a specialized lead-capture app designed for sales teams at events. It allows users to scan business cards, add context via voice or text, and generates personalized follow-up emails in under two minutes, all while enriching contact profiles with verified emails.

How does business card scanning work?

Simply take a photo of a business card using the Never Drop mobile app. The app's AI-powered OCR technology extracts essential contact information, including the name, company, title, and email, in seconds. Manual entry is also an option for user preference.

What types of events is Never Drop suitable for?

Never Drop is ideal for a variety of events, including trade shows, conferences, networking events, meetups, and business dinners. It allows users to categorize scans by event, making it easier to track leads and follow up effectively.

Do I need the mobile app?

Yes, the mobile app is essential for scanning business cards, recording voice context, and triggering follow-ups while on the go. The web dashboard complements the app by providing team management, scan review, and configuration options, ensuring seamless operation between both platforms.

Gaffa is a powerful web automation and data extraction API designed for developers. It falls squarely into the productivity and management category, as it saves teams from the immense engineering overhead of building and maintaining their own scraping infrastructure. By handling real browsers, proxies, and CAPTCHAs through a simple REST API, it lets you focus on using data, not fighting to collect it. Users often look for alternatives for a few key reasons. Pricing is a major factor, as needs can range from small personal projects to massive enterprise-scale operations. Some may require specific features Gaffa lacks, like a local SDK or integration with a particular tech stack, while others might be on a different platform like Python instead of Node.js. When evaluating alternatives, prioritize reliability against modern bot detection above all. Look for solutions that use real browsers and quality residential proxies. Consider the developer experience: is the API or SDK intuitive? Finally, assess the total cost of ownership, factoring in not just subscription fees but also the engineering time you'll save or spend on maintenance.

Never Drop is a cutting-edge lead-capture app tailored for sales teams in dynamic settings such as trade shows and networking events. By enabling users to scan business cards and enrich the data with personalized notes, it ensures that no lead is forgotten. The app's AI-driven feature drafts customized follow-up emails in mere minutes, streamlining the process of nurturing leads. Users often seek alternatives to Never Drop for various reasons, including pricing structures, desired features, or compatibility with specific platforms. When evaluating alternatives, consider factors such as ease of use, integration capabilities, and the ability to enhance productivity while ensuring that your lead management process remains efficient and effective.