I'm Alex, the founder and lead engineer behind FetchLayer.
I've been building scrapers and web data infrastructure for 10+ years now. Everything from small scripts for internal tools to APIs handling a lot of traffic against websites that are constantly changing things, blocking requests, adding CAPTCHAs, rate limits, new bot detection, etc.
A lot of FetchLayer basically came from getting tired of solving the same problems again and again. Managing proxies, sessions, retries, broken selectors, platform changes — all the stuff you need to deal with before you can even get to the actual data you wanted in the first place.
So I built FetchLayer to put all of that behind one API. You ask for the data, you get structured JSON back, and you don't really have to care what's happening underneath.
Right now FetchLayer supports Reddit, Twitter/X, YouTube comments, App Store and Google Play reviews, Google Maps reviews, and the Facebook Ad Library — seven platforms, through both the API and MCP, so it works well for regular apps but also AI agents and tools.
The thing I'd tell anyone considering building this themselves: the scraping is the easy part. Getting a working request on your laptop takes an afternoon. What takes the next two years is everything after that — the platform ships a redesign and your selectors silently return empty arrays, your proxy pool gets flagged, a rate limit changes with no announcement, and you find out because a customer's dashboard went blank on a Sunday. Most of the engineering in FetchLayer is in that layer, not in the fetching.
One decision I get asked about a lot: FetchLayer doesn't cache. Every call goes out live. Serving results from a warehouse would be cheaper and faster, and plenty of providers do it — but then you're reading a snapshot from some unknown point in the past, which quietly breaks the exact use cases people buy this for. If you're monitoring for a brand mention or handing data to an agent that's going to act on it, stale is worse than slow.
I also write most of the technical content on this site. The guides and tutorials are mostly based on things I've actually had to solve while building FetchLayer, rather than just researching a topic and writing about it.
FetchLayer's open-source projects are on fetchlayer-dev, and my other projects/code are on github.com/IamAlexandros.