A professional data API that got shut down after a legal dispute.
A single customer requested publicly available data from a professional social network. iScraper was born to serve that one person, and it later became a successful business when I expanded it to other customers.
It was 2021 when I built iScraper after one of my Upwork clients asked for professional network data. At first, I launched iScraper as a private data API for that one customer.
After a few months, I made iScraper publicly available to all customers.
Over the next couple of years, iScraper gained fame among industries that relied on up-to-date professional data. This period taught me a lot regarding handling high volume of requests, and making the systems resilient and highly available.
A major professional networking platform sued ProAPIs, Inc., the parent company of iScraper, and me personally in a US federal court. I had to call an end to iScraper, so iScraper was sunset.
Your business should not rely on any other platform without following its ToS if you want to build a successful business in the long run. Ignoring the ToS and building a business on an unreliable dependency will cause your business to collapse sooner or later.
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