How an Open Source Tool from a Small Startup Became the Backbone of Web Scraping

The quiet rise of the tool that shaped modern web scraping

In the mid-2000s, a UK-based online furniture retailer had a problem. To stay competitive, they needed a better way to monitor pricing and product listings from rival websites. The team hired a small development shop in Uruguay to help them build a system that could extract this data automatically.

The developers didn’t build a tool with grand ambitions. They built something that worked. Something fast, flexible, and easy to extend. That something became Scrapy.

A practical solution that scaled

Scrapy wasn’t the first web scraping tool out there, but it did something novel: it gave developers a framework they could actually build on. With Twisted under the hood for asynchronous requests and a modular structure that made spiders easy to create and maintain, it quietly became the tool of choice for data engineers who cared about stability and scale.

Six months after Scrapy was first built, the founding team made a deliberate choice to open source the framework. They believe that opening the code would invite the right kind of attention—the kind that brings not just users, but contributors, ideas, and staying power.

It spread the way most good tools do, word of mouth, GitHub stars, and developers sharing their code with others. By 2008, it was solving real problems for teams well beyond the original use case.

From open-source to industry backbone

Over time, Scrapy helped power use cases across e-commerce, analytics, media monitoring, and eventually, machine learning pipelines.

Today, it’s been downloaded more than 82 million times and is used by everyone from solo hackers to enterprise engineering teams. It’s not just another open-source project — it’s infrastructure for the modern web.

It also became the backbone of a company, Zyte, that would help shape the future of web data..

Why Scrapy still matters

In a world full of APIs, JavaScript-rendered content, and bot blockers, Scrapy might feel like a relic. It’s not. In fact, it’s foundational. Many modern scraping stacks, including those built on headless browsers or running in serverless environments, still rely on Scrapy at the core. It’s flexible enough to adapt, fast enough to scale, and simple enough to teach.

For many developers, their first encounter with real-world web data came through a Scrapy spider. And even with all the evolution in the ecosystem, Scrapy remains one of the most elegant ways to describe how and what you want to extract from a page.

The full story of Scrapy

Scrapy didn’t set out to change how we extract data from the web. It just did, quietly, steadily, and without much fuss. Its story is one of practical engineering, open-source momentum, and an ecosystem that grew around solving hard, messy problems.

Zyte, the creator and maintainer of Scrapy, just published a deep dive into that story: where Scrapy came from, who built it, and how it helped shape the way we gather data today.

👉 Read the full article here