Blog
Notes on web data and AI agents.
Engineering notes, product updates, and how we think about web data.
Featured
Every YC founder, with their email. Free.
8,976 Y Combinator founders from Winter 2020 to Fall 2026, with 6,774 work emails, LinkedIn, company and batch. Free through the Mindcase API.
How to Track Instagram Hashtags and Engagement for Brands
Post volume tells you how big a hashtag is. Engagement and who's actually posting tell you whether it's worth building a campaign around.
Best Web Data APIs for AI Agents in 2026
74 endpoints across nine verticals don't answer to one ranking. Here's how to navigate them, and where the deeper category breakdowns live.
Latest
Mindcase for Competitor Price Intelligence
One query surfaces every merchant selling a product. Two more calls tell you exactly what each competitor is charging and whether they're in stock.
Mindcase for Local Business Research
Google Maps and Yelp rate the same business from two different reviewer pools. Pulling both catches what one platform alone would miss.
Mindcase for Real-Time Brand Monitoring
A complaint spreads in the first hour, not the first week. An agent that checks Reddit, Twitter/X, and Google News on an hourly window — plus reaction on your own Facebook post — catches it before it's a headline.
Automate a LinkedIn Job Alert Bot for Hiring Signals
Poll LinkedIn Jobs daily, diff against what you've already seen, and only get notified about postings that are actually new.
Mindcase for E-Commerce Price Monitoring
One agent, three very different platforms — Amazon, your own Shopify store, and India's quick-commerce apps — watching the same brand's pricing in one pass.
LinkedIn Job Postings as a Company Growth Signal
Job postings carry two company-size fields most people never look at twice. Snapshot them on a schedule and headcount growth becomes a trend line.
Mindcase for Social Listening Across Platforms
Reddit, Twitter/X, TikTok, and Instagram each rank relevance differently. An agent that pulls all four in one pass and ranks each by its own real signal beats checking one tab at a time.
How to Monitor Competitor Ads on LinkedIn's Ad Library
LinkedIn's Ad Library shows exactly what a competitor is running and who paid for it — here's how to pull it as structured data instead of scrolling.
Mindcase for SEO and Search Visibility Research
Organic rank, AI Overview presence, news coverage, and shopping placement are four separate signals living on four separate Google surfaces — an agent can pull all four for one brand in three calls.
How to Track Hiring Signals Across a List of Target Companies
A company hiring fast is a company re-evaluating what it already uses. Here's how to pull job postings for a target list and read them as a signal.
Instagram Follower Growth Benchmarking for Competitor Accounts
One follower count means nothing on its own. A daily snapshot across a competitor set, compared week over week, is what actually tells you who's pulling ahead.
Automate LinkedIn Company Data Pulls on a Schedule
Stop re-searching the same criteria by hand. Turn a company search into a recurring pull that only ever shows you what's new.
Automate Instagram Profile Enrichment for New Leads
Trigger a profile pull the moment a lead signs up with an Instagram handle, and filter out low-quality matches before they ever reach your CRM.
Who's Engaging With a LinkedIn Post or Profile? Reactions and Comments Explained
LinkedIn engagement data splits into two directions: who reacted to one post, and what a specific person has been reacting to across the platform. Here's what each actually returns.
Tracking Instagram Stories Before They Disappear
Stories vanish in 24 hours and leave no public trace afterward. A pull that runs after the fact returns nothing — the polling schedule is the whole problem.
Getting LinkedIn Work Emails Without Sales Navigator
One call turns a LinkedIn profile URL into a verified work email — no Sales Navigator seat, no chaining two separate vendors together.
How to Vet an Instagram Influencer Before You Pay Them
A scoring framework built from real profile, post, and follower fields — verification, business status, posting consistency — not a gut check.
How to Get LinkedIn Company Data for Account-Based Marketing
Pull firmographic and employee data for your whole target account list in one pass, then catch the moment one of them hires a decision-maker.
Buy vs. Build: Review Monitoring Across Yelp, TripAdvisor, and Google
Three review sources means three scrapers to maintain — unless the request shape is the same across all of them.
An Alternative to Rolling Your Own Facebook Ad Library Scraper
Meta's Ad Library has no documented API behind it. Building your own puller is a real option — the cost just doesn't show up on day one.
An Alternative to Building Your Own Google Maps Scraper
What it actually costs to maintain a Google Maps scraper yourself, what the official Places API doesn't solve, and where the crossover point is.
An Alternative to Building a Twitter/X Listening Tool
X's own API is pay-per-read now, with a 2 million-read monthly cap before you're pushed to Enterprise pricing. Here's what building against it yourself actually costs.
Buy vs. Build: Amazon Price Monitoring
What a DIY Amazon scraper actually costs once you count layout drift, buy-box shuffling, and silent null data — against the real per-pull price.
How Job Freshness Actually Works: Live vs. Cached Data
Every Mindcase request re-fetches from the live source at call time. Here's what that actually buys you, and what it costs.
Buy vs. Build: YouTube Channel Analytics
YouTube has an official, free API. It also has a quota that runs out in an afternoon the moment your workflow involves search.
Buy vs. Build: TikTok Trend Monitoring
A TikTok scraper looks like a weekend project until the first session gets flagged. Here's the real cost of keeping one running, against the per-post price of not building one.
Mindcase for Influencer Vetting
An agent workflow that pulls a creator's Instagram, TikTok, and YouTube credibility signals in one pass instead of checking each platform by hand.
Best Facebook Data APIs for AI Agents in 2026
Ads, pages, and marketplace are three different data problems on Facebook. Here's what actually matters when picking an API for each.
Mindcase for Outbound Prospecting
Give a coding agent your API key and skills.md, and it runs the whole prospecting pipeline — companies, people, emails, shortlist — without you writing the glue code.
Best E-Commerce Review APIs for AI Agents in 2026
A product review and a business review answer different questions. Here's what actually matters when picking an API for each, across Amazon, Yelp, and Google Maps.
Mindcase for Company Intelligence
Firmographics, recent news, and live ad spend are three separate lookups. An agent can pull all three and hand you one brief instead of three tabs.
Best TikTok Data APIs for AI Agents in 2026
TikTok data isn't one thing. Posts, profiles, shop listings, comments, and followers are five separate questions with five separate answers.
Mindcase for Talent and Hiring Research
Point an agent at four job boards and let it come back with a real salary range and skill list for a role, instead of you reading fifty postings by hand.
Best Google Maps APIs for AI Agents in 2026
What to actually check before you pick a Google Maps data source — coverage, pricing shape, and whether it inherits Google's own results ceiling.
Best Quick-Commerce Data APIs for AI Agents in 2026
Blinkit, Zepto, and Instamart return nearly identical fields. The real difference between them is city and store coverage — here's how to pick.
Best Google Data APIs for AI Agents in 2026
Google Search, Shopping, Images, and News aren't one data source with four names on it — they're four different shapes of data. Here's what to check before you pick.
Best Amazon Data APIs for AI Agents in 2026
Most Amazon scraper roundups compare tool names. The factors that actually change how a pipeline behaves are batching shape, freshness, and Amazon's own hard limits.
Best Travel and Hospitality Data APIs for AI Agents in 2026
Airbnb, Booking.com, and TripAdvisor aren't the same shape of data source — one splits its catalog by property type, two don't.
Best Social Listening APIs for AI Agents in 2026
Reddit, Twitter/X, and TikTok don't just differ in audience — one of them can't even search by keyword. Here's what actually matters when picking a social listening data source.
Best Job Board APIs for AI Agents in 2026
Indeed, LinkedIn, Naukri, and Upwork aren't competing products — they're four different job markets with a 60x price spread between them.
A Crunchbase Alternative for Firmographic Company Data
Crunchbase is sold as a seat. If what you actually need is firmographic data on a list of known companies, that's a per-call job, not a database subscription.
Buy vs. Build: Instagram Data Pipelines
Building your own Instagram pipeline is a bet that you'll staff it forever. Here's when that bet actually pays off, and what it costs when it doesn't.
Buy vs. Build: LinkedIn Company Enrichment
The real crossover point between paying per company and building your own pipeline, plus the cost most DIY estimates leave out.
Best Instagram Data APIs for AI Agents in 2026
Instagram data isn't one API decision — it's five separate ones. Here's what actually differs between them, and how to evaluate any vendor against your real use case.
Best LinkedIn Data APIs for AI Agents in 2026
Coverage, pricing shape, and freshness are the three things that actually predict whether a LinkedIn data source holds up — not a features checklist.
How to Use LinkedIn for Lead Generation
Find companies that fit your ICP, pull the people at them, and filter down to who's actually worth messaging — no scraper, no stale list.