Kickstarter Campaigns Scraper

What this Actor scrapes

Kickstarter has no official public API for campaign discovery — we read the site's own internal discovery endpoint and the campaign-detail payload embedded in each project page, so you get structured funding progress, backer counts, creator and location data, and (optionally) full reward-tier and add-on detail without hand-scraping the Discover page yourself.

What we handle for you

• 🛡️ Browser fingerprint rotation + cookie warmup — curl-cffi impersonates real Chrome / Firefox / Safari TLS handshakes and warms cookies on the public Discover page before every session, so Kickstarter's internal endpoints see a real browser.
• 🧩 We parse Kickstarter's undocumented wire format for you — the JSON-and-unicode-escaped window.current_project payload embedded in each project page, isolated in one parser module so a format change doesn't break your pipeline.
• 🔁 Retries with exponential backoff on 408 / 429 / 503 — up to 5 attempts, fresh session on every retry.
• 🧱 A single bad reward-tier page never drops a row — you get listing-only fields with a clear log instead of a failed run.
• 🧊 Clean, typed dataset rows — Pydantic-validated, ISO-8601 timestamps, stable IDs, JSON / CSV / Excel export straight from the Apify Console.
• 💰 Pay-Per-Event pricing — you only pay for results that hit your dataset. No data, no charge.

Use cases

• Competitive product-launch tracking — monitor new campaigns in your category before they hit the mainstream press.
• Crowdfunding trend-spotting — pull a category's live campaigns to see what's gaining traction and how fast.
• Market research — analyze funding goals, pledge velocity, and backer counts across a niche before launching your own campaign.
• Reward-tier benchmarking — compare pricing and reward structures across competing campaigns in the same category.

Input

Paste this into the Apify Console, or send it as the run input over the API. Proxy settings are on by default; you rarely need to touch them.

{
  "category": "technology",
  "maxItems": 3,
  "includeRewardTiers": true,
  "proxyConfiguration": {
    "useApifyProxy": true
  }
}

Output

One row per result, schema-validated before it is written. Export JSON, CSV, Excel or XML from the run, or read it over the API.

campaign_idnameblurbslugstategoal_usdpledged_usdpercent_fundedbackers_countcurrencycountrydeadlinecreated_atlaunched_atstaff_pickcreator_id

{
  "campaign_id": 1234567890,
  "name": "Nomad Drone: The Foldable 4K Explorer",
  "blurb": "A pocket-sized 4K drone that folds flat and flies for 40 minutes.",
  "slug": "nomad-drone-4k-explorer",
  "state": "live",
  "goal_usd": 25000.0,
  "pledged_usd": 41823.5,
  "percent_funded": 167.29,
  "backers_count": 612,
  "currency": "USD",
  "country": "US",
  "deadline": "2026-09-01T17:00:00Z",
  "created_at": "2026-06-10T14:22:00Z",
  "launched_at": "2026-07-05T15:00:00Z",
  "staff_pick": true,
  "creator_id": 987654321,
  "creator_name": "Nomad Aero Labs",
  "location_name": "Austin, TX",
  "location_state": "TX",
  "location_country": "US",
  "category_id": 16,
  "category_name": "Gadgets",
  "category_parent_name": "Technology",
  "project_url": "https://www.kickstarter.com/projects/987654321/nomad-drone-4k-explorer",
  "image_url": "https://ksr-ugc.imgix.net/assets/example.jpg",
  "comments_count": 214,
  "updates_count": 9,
  "tags": [
    "Editor's Pick"
  ],
  "reward_tiers": [
    {
      "reward_id": 111,
      "title": "Early Bird Nomad Drone",
      "minimum_usd": 149.0,
      "description": "One Nomad Drone at the early-bird price. Ships worldwide.",
      "backers_count": 340,
      "estimated_delivery": "2026-12-01T00:00:00Z",
      "shipping_enabled": true,
      "available": true
    }
  ],
  "scraped_at": "2026-08-02T09:15:00Z"
}

Pricing

You pay only for results that land. Cap any run with maxTotalChargeUsd. See pricing & billing for worked examples.