Flashcrawl – Indie Web Crawl Cloud

Let solo developers schedule lightweight crawler nodes with a few lines of code

Problem

A developer showed a search engine built from the CommonCrawl corpus, covering 4 billion pages across 33.5 million domains, proving real interest among solo builders and small teams in large-scale crawling. But the bottleneck in such projects is crawl, dedupe, and storage infrastructure, not the search algorithm. Existing crawl services are either enterprise-oriented or priced for high request volumes.

Solution

A lightweight crawl orchestration platform for individuals: submit seed URLs and rules, the system crawls concurrently across several nodes, handles dedupe, robots.txt, and incremental updates, and stores results as downloadable Parquet/JSONL. No analytics UI—just a reliable data acquisition layer.

Users

Indie developers and researchers building datasets, search indexes, AI training corpora, or competitor monitoring

MVP

Submit URL lists or seeds; concurrent crawling with dedupe; robots.txt and rate-limit handling; incremental updates exported as Parquet/JSONL; simple job status dashboard

Revenue

Usage-based pricing per page crawled, with a free tier; subscription for higher concurrency and incremental updates

Why now

AI training and retrieval projects are driving huge demand for proprietary corpora, while public datasets like CommonCrawl update slowly and cover unevenly; indie devs don't want to run their own crawl cluster