Gaffa

About Gaffa

If you've ever tried to scrape data from the modern web at any serious scale, you know the pain. It's a never-ending arms race against bot detection, CAPTCHAs, and JavaScript-heavy sites that laugh at simple HTTP requests. You end up spending more time maintaining a fragile pipeline of headless browsers, proxy rotations, and error handling than you do on your actual business logic. Gaffa is the antidote to this madness. In my opinion, it's one of the most elegantly designed solutions in the space. It's a powerful API that abstracts away the entire, messy infrastructure of web automation and data extraction. Instead of wrestling with Playwright configurations and proxy providers, you send a simple REST API request. Gaffa takes care of the rest: deploying real browsers, managing residential proxies, scaling to meet demand, handling failures, and even parsing the data into your preferred format. It's built explicitly for developers and businesses who need reliable web data but want to focus their engineering resources on core product development, not on fixing broken scrapers. The core value proposition is profound simplicity and reliability where it's needed most.

Features of Gaffa

Simple REST API for Browser Control

This is Gaffa's killer feature, in my view. They've done the hard work of abstracting the complex capabilities of tools like Playwright and Puppeteer into a clean, intuitive REST API. You don't need to learn a new framework or manage browser instances. A single POST request can initiate a sequence of actions—like navigating, scrolling, clicking, and waiting—that perfectly mimics human behavior. This dramatically lowers the barrier to entry and accelerates development time for any web automation task.

Stealth Mode with Real Browsers & Proxies

For scraping the toughest, most defensive sites, Gaffa's "stealth mode" is essential. It doesn't rely on easily detectable headless browsers but uses fully-fledged, real browser instances. Coupled with its integrated network of residential proxies (which provide IP addresses from actual homes worldwide), your requests blend in with genuine human traffic. It even handles CAPTCHA solving automatically. This feature is what transforms Gaffa from a simple tool into a robust solution for enterprise-grade data collection.

Flexible Data Output & Processing

Gaffa understands that raw HTML is often just the beginning. Beyond fetching the page source, it can process and return data in the format that best suits your downstream needs. You can get a clean screenshot, simplified HTML, LLM-ready markdown, or even a self-contained offline version of the page. My personal favorite is the ability to use an LLM to extract structured JSON directly from the page, turning unstructured web data into ready-to-use information instantly.

Full Observability and Managed Scaling

Forget about invisible failures. Gaffa records your automation sessions, allowing you to visually replay exactly what happened—what was clicked, what loaded, and where it might have failed. This is a game-changer for debugging. Furthermore, they handle all the infrastructure scaling automatically. You define the "what," and Gaffa worries about the "how," seamlessly managing concurrency, resources, and reliability so you can make thousands of requests without a second thought.

Use Cases of Gaffa

Large-Scale Competitive Intelligence & Price Monitoring

Continuously track product prices, inventory levels, and promotional content across hundreds of e-commerce competitor sites. Gaffa's ability to run concurrent browsers with residential proxies ensures you get accurate, real-time data without being blocked, enabling dynamic pricing strategies and market analysis.

Automated Lead Generation & Data Enrichment

Scrape business directories, professional networks, or niche websites to build targeted lead lists. You can automate the search, navigation, and extraction of contact details, company information, and other firmographic data, enriching your CRM with valuable, up-to-date information pulled directly from the source.

Content Aggregation for AI & LLM Training

Gather large volumes of high-quality text and data from across the web to train or fine-tune large language models. The ability to output content as clean markdown or structured JSON is perfect for creating curated datasets, saving immense time on data cleaning and formatting.

Automated Testing & Monitoring of Web Applications

Simulate complex user journeys to monitor the health and performance of your own or a client's web application. Automate login sequences, form submissions, and multi-step workflows to check for broken elements, performance regressions, or content changes, all with the observability to see exactly what went wrong.

Frequently Asked Questions

How does Gaffa's credit system work?

Credits are the unit of consumption for Gaffa. They are primarily based on two factors: browser time and proxy bandwidth. Browser runtime is charged at 1 credit per 30 seconds (2 credits if screen recording is on). Using residential proxies incurs a cost of 1500 credits per 1GB of data transferred. Each successful request deducts the calculated credits from your monthly plan allowance, providing a clear cost structure tied directly to usage.

Is there a free trial available?

Absolutely, and it's a generous one. You can sign up for free and gain immediate access to the full Gaffa API to build and test automations. The key is that your free requests run on Gaffa's dedicated demo site (demo.gaffa.dev). This allows you to experiment with every feature—scrolling, clicking, data extraction—without cost, giving you a complete understanding of the platform's power before you need to pay for use on the live web.

What happens to unused credits at the end of the month?

Credits do not roll over from one billing period to the next. Your credit allowance is reset on each monthly billing cycle. This is a common model in API services and emphasizes the importance of selecting a plan that matches your expected monthly usage to avoid leaving credits on the table.

Can Gaffa handle websites with complex JavaScript?

Yes, this is one of its core strengths. Unlike simple HTTP scrapers, Gaffa uses real, full-fledged browser instances (like Chrome) by default. This means it fully renders JavaScript, waits for dynamic content to load, and can interact with page elements exactly as a human user would. It's designed specifically to handle the modern, complex web.

Pricing of Gaffa

Gaffa offers straightforward, tiered monthly plans designed to scale with your needs. The Starter plan at $29/month is perfect for small projects, offering 9,000 credits and 1 concurrent request. For growing startups, the Startup plan at $99/month provides 35,000 credits and 3 concurrent requests. The Growth plan at $249/month is for serious scaling, with 100,000 credits and 10 concurrent requests. All plans include access to the browser API and residential proxies. If you need more flexibility, you can purchase pay-as-you-go credits at $20 for 5,000 credits, which is a great option for sporadic or unpredictable workloads. For large, enterprise requirements, they encourage you to contact them for a custom plan.