Comments
Hacker News
I was using Context back when it was still Brand.dev. I found it to be a great product- one of those rare APIs that immediately made a problem I had disappear. Had it in production within an hour of signing up
Agents need clean/current context from the web, and this is the best way I’ve found to give it to them. The internet is clearly moving in this direction: companies are starting to realize their sites need to be legible to agents. Some are already adapting but many haven’t yet. Context feels like an important part of that transition
Yahia is a great builder. His pace of expansion has been impressive, excited to see where he takes Context.
by modo_
How did you find your differentiation in a highly commoditized space? It's probably one of the most crowded spaces.
Even within YC, there are many competitors that do pretty much the same thing:
- Firecrawl
- BrowserUse
- Browserbase
- CloudCruise
- NotteLabs
- Intuned
- Expand.ai
- Reworkd
And then you have the extremely well-funded web retrieval players like Parallel and Exa.
How do you differentiate to all these?
Another thing that might interest HN: AI crawlers come with negative side effects for website owners (costs, downtime, etc.), as repeatedly reported here on HN (and experienced myself).
Does Context respect robots.txt directives and do you disclose the identity of your crawlers via user-agent header?
Unclear what difference exists against Firecrawl - their team has been shipping great features extremely quickly lately, and their core offerings have become really good.
I am interested in KnifeGeek though - looking for a good OTF (ultratech?)
by m_w_
Have a look at Intercept. [0] I don't have a need for it, likely it is dated and will require some more tuning, and I want to get away from scraping. Creating typed Typescript proxy API for any website might be something you find useful.
> Reverse-engineers any website by doing a breadth search across every transport (JSON, WebSocket, WebRTC, GraphQL, SSE, HLS, PubSub), listing them all, and generating a typed JSON API that bypasses almost all bot protections — including Turnstile. I didn't include the ability, but it bypassed the most advanced ChatGPT + Turnstile. Built with self-improving Claude Code agents that rewrite their own instructions until fresh agents consistently succeed.
> Once connected to a page, it intercepts every byte of network traffic — then actively drives the page to surface endpoints that only fire on interaction. It types into forms, clicks buttons, scrolls, triggers modals, paginates, submits searches, and walks through multi-step flows, watching what each action produces on the wire. Every request gets captured with its method, headers, payload shape, and response, then classified by transport (JSON, WebSocket, WebRTC, GraphQL, SSE, HLS, PubSub). The result is a complete map of the site's real API surface — including the hidden endpoints that only exist behind a click — turned into typed proxy routes you can curl.
by dataviz1000
Hi! Congrats on the launch, I gained LOTS of great insights from your comments, particualrly the bits about diffrentiation in a crowded market.
I am building something in agentic automation space, currently it's still under development, but would love to know your journey of ideating -> building -> getting the first customer -> iterating -> and presumably getting into YC.
Am still relatively new to this (19 lol) so I got a long way, but would really appreciate any insights :)
Cheers! Wish you luck with Context.
by aadv1k
Are you using residential proxies? How do you handle websites that don't want to be scraped.
EG if I start passing in Linkedin pages what is your expectation of the result that people would see per profile.
EDIT:
Congrats on the launch seriously hard work, just wanting to understand your scraping stance more. I've worked with a lot of tools on this, didn't mean for my initial comment to be adversarial.
by twosdai
I like the clarity, tone, and readability of your webpage. Also your FAQ is refreshing
> When Should I talk to sales? > Talk to sales if you need high-volume pricing beyond 2M credits/month, custom rate limits, SSO / SAML, SCIM provisioning, an uptime SLA, annual invoicing, an MSA / DPA, or a dedicated support channel. Reach us at hello@context.dev or through the contact page.
Would that this were the norm everywhere, rather than (say) a sales rep from Datadog scraping my phone number from who knows where to ask about my company's needs after I sign up for a free account on a whim :)
by setgree
If you want to vibe something that gets you 70% of the way to this well funded startup in like 15 minutes just tell your LLM of choice to create a hook or override the web fetching skill to pipe the content through Mozilla’s readability extension that strips the DOM elements out deterministically, leaving only the content. You can then parse it however you want. Can be done entirely client side, in runtime, with a few JavaScript libraries
by SOLAR_FIELDS
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- Hacker News
- I was using Context back when it was still Brand.dev. I found it to be a great product- one of those rare APIs that immediately made a problem I had disappear. Had it in production within an hour of signing up
Agents need clean/current context from the web, and this is the best way I’ve found to give it to them. The internet is clearly moving in this direction: companies are starting to realize their sites need to be legible to agents. Some are already adapting but many haven’t yet. Context feels like an important part of that transition
Yahia is a great builder. His pace of expansion has been impressive, excited to see where he takes Context.
by modo_ - How did you find your differentiation in a highly commoditized space? It's probably one of the most crowded spaces.
Even within YC, there are many competitors that do pretty much the same thing:
- Firecrawl
- BrowserUse
- Browserbase
- CloudCruise
- NotteLabs
- Intuned
- Expand.ai
- Reworkd
And then you have the extremely well-funded web retrieval players like Parallel and Exa.
How do you differentiate to all these?
Another thing that might interest HN: AI crawlers come with negative side effects for website owners (costs, downtime, etc.), as repeatedly reported here on HN (and experienced myself).
Does Context respect robots.txt directives and do you disclose the identity of your crawlers via user-agent header?
- Unclear what difference exists against Firecrawl - their team has been shipping great features extremely quickly lately, and their core offerings have become really good.
I am interested in KnifeGeek though - looking for a good OTF (ultratech?)
by m_w_ - Have a look at Intercept. [0] I don't have a need for it, likely it is dated and will require some more tuning, and I want to get away from scraping. Creating typed Typescript proxy API for any website might be something you find useful.
> Reverse-engineers any website by doing a breadth search across every transport (JSON, WebSocket, WebRTC, GraphQL, SSE, HLS, PubSub), listing them all, and generating a typed JSON API that bypasses almost all bot protections — including Turnstile. I didn't include the ability, but it bypassed the most advanced ChatGPT + Turnstile. Built with self-improving Claude Code agents that rewrite their own instructions until fresh agents consistently succeed.
> Once connected to a page, it intercepts every byte of network traffic — then actively drives the page to surface endpoints that only fire on interaction. It types into forms, clicks buttons, scrolls, triggers modals, paginates, submits searches, and walks through multi-step flows, watching what each action produces on the wire. Every request gets captured with its method, headers, payload shape, and response, then classified by transport (JSON, WebSocket, WebRTC, GraphQL, SSE, HLS, PubSub). The result is a complete map of the site's real API surface — including the hidden endpoints that only exist behind a click — turned into typed proxy routes you can curl.
by dataviz1000 - Hi! Congrats on the launch, I gained LOTS of great insights from your comments, particualrly the bits about diffrentiation in a crowded market.
I am building something in agentic automation space, currently it's still under development, but would love to know your journey of ideating -> building -> getting the first customer -> iterating -> and presumably getting into YC.
Am still relatively new to this (19 lol) so I got a long way, but would really appreciate any insights :)
Cheers! Wish you luck with Context.
by aadv1k - Are you using residential proxies? How do you handle websites that don't want to be scraped.
EG if I start passing in Linkedin pages what is your expectation of the result that people would see per profile.
EDIT:
Congrats on the launch seriously hard work, just wanting to understand your scraping stance more. I've worked with a lot of tools on this, didn't mean for my initial comment to be adversarial.
by twosdai - I like the clarity, tone, and readability of your webpage. Also your FAQ is refreshing
> When Should I talk to sales? > Talk to sales if you need high-volume pricing beyond 2M credits/month, custom rate limits, SSO / SAML, SCIM provisioning, an uptime SLA, annual invoicing, an MSA / DPA, or a dedicated support channel. Reach us at hello@context.dev or through the contact page.
Would that this were the norm everywhere, rather than (say) a sales rep from Datadog scraping my phone number from who knows where to ask about my company's needs after I sign up for a free account on a whim :)
by setgree - If you want to vibe something that gets you 70% of the way to this well funded startup in like 15 minutes just tell your LLM of choice to create a hook or override the web fetching skill to pipe the content through Mozilla’s readability extension that strips the DOM elements out deterministically, leaving only the content. You can then parse it however you want. Can be done entirely client side, in runtime, with a few JavaScript librariesby SOLAR_FIELDS