Launch HN: Context.dev (YC S26) – API to get structured data from any website

Context.dev showed up on Hacker News promising a very simple pitch: give apps and AI tools a quick way to read websites, pull out useful facts, and turn messy pages into neat, structured information. The startup says setup takes minutes, with one-line help for coding assistants, a free tier, and customer name-drops like Mintlify and daily.dev. On paper, it’s the kind of product pitch designed to make founders and app builders lean in fast.

But the real show was in the comments, where the crowd split into two very online camps: “finally, this solves a huge pain” versus “great, another scraper to block.” One commenter boiled the whole thing down to a brutally simple label: basically web scraping as a service. Another immediately went full defensive mode, warning this is exactly the kind of thing websites will start fighting server-side, comparing it to the old days of stopping image leeches from draining bandwidth. That one has major “here we go again” energy.

Then came the pricing panic and credibility questions. One skeptic called it wildly expensive and side-eyed the lack of any mention of rotating internet addresses, suggesting that makes it weak for tougher data jobs. Others dragged in competitors, asking what makes this different from Firecrawl. Still, one happy user cut through the doomposting with the ultimate startup compliment: it solved a real problem so fast they had it live within an hour. Even a random knife joke sneaked in, because no Hacker News thread is complete without a sudden left turn.