A captcha is a line item, not a wall: Mentor Municipal, OH Agencies told that a county with a captcha is off the table are being told too much. Mentor Municipal Court, OH uses the recordSearch.php PHP docket portal, gated by an image captcha. The module reuses the shared recordSearch.php helper for the flow and passes the captcha image to CapSolver. The captcha adds a step and a per-solve cost, not a wall. I would put it plainly in a quote: captcha means recurring solver cost and one more thing that can break. No server-side date-range filter exposed. Built scraper module with no stored output, so no volumes. Which counties on your wish list have you set aside because of a captcha?

Data resellers weighing a PDF-only source: my House disclosure prototype, honestly Plenty of useful public data lives only inside PDFs, which is why vendors tend to skip it. Here is a small prototype against the House Clerk's disclosure portal, with its real status. The portal searches by last name and filing year. My script opens a session and picks up the anti-forgery token, searches, downloads the PDF, and reads the periodic transaction table with pdfplumber. Fields returned: owner, asset, type, date, notification_date, amount, cap_gains, description. Status: a 382-line command-line prototype, tested on three sample PDFs. There is no volume to quote and I am not calling it a feed. What it does show is the shape. A form, a token and a table inside a PDF is a common portal pattern, and newsletters and alert services use this kind of data. Which PDF-only sources do clients ask you about that you currently turn down?

The intake brief for a new-county request: seven questions before any code Account managers relaying a client request: the build goes wrong at the brief, not in the code. Before I write any scraper code I need these answered. - Which exact portal and record type, and can you send the link? - What date range, and how far back is history needed? - What does one useful row look like? Which columns? - Individuals only, or businesses too? - Is contact data to be added, and for what use? - Where does it land: Sheet, CSV, CRM or API? - How often, and what happens today when it breaks? The last is the most revealing. Most people have no answer. I also ask about the intended use. Skip-traced data for marketing outreach is fine. The same data used for credit, tenant or employment decisions is not something I will supply. Ten minutes on these saves a week of rework. What do your clients usually leave out of the brief when they ask for a new county? Do you think there's any questions I'm missing?

I just rebuilt our website, and the biggest change was deleting things. We used to say we build custom software for businesses. That’s true, and it told nobody anything. Now the whole site says one thing: we scrape county and court portals and deliver the records daily. Judgments, probate, mortgage, divorce, foreclosure and UCC, wherever a portal publishes them. Niching down felt like turning work away. But the portal projects are the ones we keep getting asked about, and they’re the ones where we’ve already solved the annoying parts: captchas, result caps, sessions that expire mid-run. If you pull records from county sites by hand, the site shows how we handle it, and you can apply for a free pilot. You can check out the website at junelabs.dev What’s the one portal you dread checking every week?

Pulled together a list of ~50,000 Instagram/Tiktok creators. Complete with verified contact emails, handles, follower counts, 30-day GMV data, and audience language/demographics. The kind of data that would normally cost $500+/month on a platform like Modash or Upfluence — I built the pipeline myself and ran it for basically nothing. Took some patience getting the data to line up cleanly (deduping, validating emails, normalizing fields across sources) but the end result is a clean, structured dataset I can actually use. Honestly the most satisfying part isn't even the data itself — it's knowing I can spin this up for any niche, any platform, whenever I need it. Anyone else been working on scraping or data collection projects lately? Always curious what workflows other people are building. Drop it below