u/WarAndPeace06

Hey everyone, I'm building an SEO tool that scrapes SERPs + competitor pages, the tool then feeds everything into Claude for content gap analysis and on-page recommendations. The problem is I need two separate products: a Search API (SerpAPI, ValueSERP) for structured Google results and a Web Scraper API (ScraperAPI, Zenrows) for actual page content, and together the pricing at 50k keyword lookups + 500k page scrapes/month is quite high. DIY Playwright setups are a maintenance nightmare and to be honest I'm tired of adjusting every single thing every time something breaks. The AI analysis part works beautifully in my prototype, but right now it's kinda useless without clean, reliable scraped data feeding into it. Has anyone found a single product that handles both SERP data and page scraping well without destroying a startup budget? Talking about something like an integrated product that has everything in it, less maintenance, less headaches

Unpopular opinion, but I see startups either completely ignoring their search feature or spending weeks building some crazy fast system when they have like 50 users, this mainly coming from other startup subs, specifically Indian market. People expect Google-level search now, they type a few letters, make typos, and still want perfect results immediately, otherwise they just bounce. Good search can actually win you customers though, especially in B2B. I've literally watched deals close because "wow, your search actually works" during a demo. But honestly, if you're still trying to find product-market-fit, why are you messing with Elasticsearch configs? Below maybe 1,000 items, regular database queries work totally fine for most stuff. Just ship with basic PostgreSQL search or whatever, build the thing people actually want, and upgrade later when it's actually slow. Sometimes showing results instantly (even if it takes 100ms) feels faster than a technically quicker search with a loading spinner anyway. The companies doing well aren't the ones with the most optimized search - they're the ones who shipped fast, then fixed the slow parts once they mattered. Anyone else dealt with this or am I just ranting into the void here?

P.S I worked on a few different startups, NA, Asia, EU markets hence why I created this post, to see what's up with fellow startupers.