Gaffa: Web Automation API

What Gaffa: Web Automation API does

Gaffa, operated by Impetus Labs Ltd., is a London-based developer API platform founded in 2024 that provides browser automation and web scraping as a managed REST API. The product controls real cloud-hosted browsers (rather than headless browsers) via a single endpoint, abstracting away the operational complexity of Playwright, Selenium, and Puppeteer along with the surrounding infrastructure of proxy procurement, IP rotation, scaling, and caching. Core capabilities include JavaScript rendering by default, a residential proxy network with locations in the US, Ireland, Singapore, and France, screen recording for observability, ad blocking, and a catalog of browser actions (click, type, scroll, wait, screenshot capture, PDF generation, markdown conversion, table parsing, and AI-powered structured JSON extraction via gpt-4o-mini). Additional services include Mapping Requests for sitemap discovery and a Schema API for managing reusable extraction schemas, plus an interactive API Playground and an LLMs.txt file that lets AI coding assistants generate Gaffa integrations.

The business model is a hybrid of subscription tiers and usage-based credit consumption. Pricing includes a freemium tier with 500 free credits, three monthly subscription plans — Starter at $29/month (9,000 credits), Startup at $99/month (35,000 credits, flagged as "Popular"), and Growth at $249/month (100,000 credits) — plus a pay-as-you-go option at $20 per 5,000 credits. Custom enterprise plans are available via direct contact. Distribution is product-led and self-serve through gaffa.dev, supported by technical documentation, a blog with tutorials and customer stories, a newsletter, and developer-event participation including Major League Hacking's Global Hack Week Cloud. Payments are processed via Stripe. The company is privately held, bootstrapped with no disclosed venture funding, and operates with a 1-10 person team led by founder James Mundy. Named customers include SailSys (sailing club management), ivee (job board aggregation), and TRMNL (e-ink displays) — all small startups using Gaffa for printing reports, scraping job boards, and powering content-to-display pipelines respectively.

Name

Gaffa: Web Automation API

Legal name

Impetus Labs Ltd.

Website

https://gaffa.dev

Company type

Private

Founded year

2024

Operating status

Operating

Headcount range

1–10 employees

Short description

Gaffa is a London-based developer API platform that turns web scraping and browser automation into a single managed REST API over real cloud-hosted browsers. It serves individual developers, startups, and scaling businesses building scraping, LLM-data-pipeline, and automation products.

Ownership category

akta.pro rank

Product category

Browser Automation API

NAICS

Computing Infrastructure Providers, Data Processing, Web Hosting, and Related Services (5182), Web Search Portals and All Other Information Services (519290)

SIC

Services-Prepackaged Software (7372)

akta.pro primary industry

Web Archiving, Cache & Snapshot Services (BPAMAAAL)

akta.pro secondary industry

Cloud Encoding & Transcoding Services (SaaS/PaaS) (MPAHAHAC)

Keywords

• Browser automation API
• Web scraping API
• Residential proxy network
• LLM-ready data extraction
• Headless browser service

Headquarters

HQ city

London

HQ country

United Kingdom

HQ region

Europe

Offices1 record

Markets served

GTM type

B2B

Offering type

Software

Cost components

Infrastructure, Technology or R&D, Operations, Marketing or Sales, Personnel

Revenue model

1. Subscription Plans (Starter, Startup, Growth): Monthly subscription plans with tiered credit allocations. Each plan includes a monthly credit allowance that resets each billing cycle. Credits do not roll over month to month.
2. Pay-as-you-go Credit Purchases: Purchase additional credits on demand at $20 per 5,000 credits. Can be used standalone or in addition to subscription plans.
3. Usage-based Credit Consumption: Credits consumed based on: request length (1 credit per 30 seconds of browser runtime, or 2 credits per 30 seconds with screen recording), proxy bandwidth (750 credits per 1GB with proxy_location parameter), and AI parsing (1 credit per 20,000 input tokens and 1 credit per 10,000 output tokens for gpt-4o-mini)

Pricing tiers

Go-to-market motion2 records

Distribution channels3 records

Marketing channels6 records

Core offering

Gaffa provides a REST API that controls real, cloud-hosted browsers at scale for web scraping, screenshot capture, PDF generation, and LLM-ready data extraction. It abstracts away browser automation frameworks (Playwright, Selenium, Puppeteer), proxy management, caching, and infrastructure scaling behind a single API call, with integrated residential proxy rotation and AI-powered structured parsing using gpt-4o-mini.

Product overview

Gaffa is a browser automation API platform consisting of three core products: Browser Requests API (the main product for controlling cloud-hosted browsers), Mapping Requests (for sitemap discovery and URL extraction), and Schema API (for managing reusable data extraction schemas). These are complemented by an API Playground for testing, various browser action features (screenshot, markdown generation, PDF printing, table parsing, JSON extraction), and AI-powered parsing capabilities using gpt-4o-mini. The platform handles infrastructure management including proxy rotation, scaling, caching, and headless browser configuration.

Differentiator

Problem solved

Functional benefit

Products and services

• Browser Requests API Primary REST API product for browser automation. Controls real cloud-hosted browsers to perform web scraping, screenshot capture, PDF generation, and structured data extraction at scale, with built-in residential proxy rotation, shared caching, ad blocking, screen recording, and LLM-ready outputs. Targeted at developers and engineering teams who want browser automation without managing Playwright, Selenium, Puppeteer, or their own browser infrastructure.
• Mapping Requests Standalone API endpoint for sitemap discovery and URL extraction. Automatically detects and parses website sitemaps, traverses nested sitemap hierarchies, aggregates URLs with deduplication, and uses residential proxies to avoid blocks. Used by customers to inventory sites before bulk scraping.
• Schema API API endpoints for managing reusable data extraction schemas used with the Parse JSON action. Supports CRUD operations to define structured JSON schemas (with arrays, objects, datetimes, strings, booleans, decimals, integers) that govern how web content and PDFs are extracted.
• API Playground Interactive developer tool for testing Gaffa API requests in-browser. Includes prebuilt example automations for printing to PDF, converting pages to markdown, infinite scrolling, taking screenshots, and completing forms. Used for evaluation and developer onboarding.

Quantifiable outcome

• 43% token savings when using max_media_bandwidth=0 on image-heavy news sites
• +1 more outcomes

Named customers3 records

Segments4 records

Ideal customer profiles3 records

Technology focussed Yes

API detail

Has API

Yes

API docs

API detail

Core technology

AI maturity

App detail

Integration1 record

AI capability8 records

Feature14 records

Partnerships

One partnership is on record.

• StripecoreTechnology or IntegrationStripe is used as the payment systems operator for processing transactions on the Gaffa platform. Listed in privacy policy as a third-party service provider for payment processing functionality.

Scale indicators4 records

Recent moves4 records

Expansion highlights6 records

Emerging players

• Browserbase: Browserbase provides cloud-hosted browser infrastructure as an API for automation, scraping, and AI agent workflows. Directly adjacent to Gaffa's real-browser automation core but with less emphasis on built-in residential proxies and LLM-specific output formats.
• Steel.dev: Steel.dev offers a browser automation API aimed at AI agents and developers needing cloud browser sessions. Closely comparable to Gaffa on real-browser-as-a-service for AI workloads, though narrower in scraping-specific feature depth.
• Browse.ai: Browse.ai offers no-code/low-code web scraping and monitoring, including robot training and scheduled data extraction. Adjacent to Gaffa on web-scraping-as-a-service but targets a less technical buyer persona with a UI-first approach.

Direct peers

• Bright Data: Bright Data (formerly Luminati) operates one of the largest residential proxy networks paired with scraping APIs and datasets. Comparable to Gaffa on proxy infrastructure, scraping-as-a-service, and serving developer/enterprise data-pipeline use cases.
• Oxylabs: Oxylabs runs a residential proxy network alongside scraping APIs (including an AI-powered parser) and datasets. Comparable to Gaffa across proxy-backed scraping, structured data extraction, and developer/enterprise customer overlap.
• Apify: Apify is a full-stack web scraping and browser automation platform offering a REST API and 'Actors' for browser-based scraping. Directly comparable to Gaffa in target customer (developers), delivery model (API), and core use cases (scraping, automation, LLM data extraction).
• Zyte: Zyte (formerly Scrapinghub) offers an API and managed services for large-scale web scraping, with browser automation, proxy management, and AI-powered extraction. Directly comparable in offering, customer segment, and scraping infrastructure.
• ScraperAPI: ScraperAPI provides a REST API for web scraping with built-in proxy rotation, headless browser handling, and structured data parsing. Closely comparable product model to Gaffa — developer-facing API with usage-based pricing and residential proxy integration.

Broad incumbents

• Diffbot: Diffbot is a long-standing web data extraction platform offering AI-based page parsing, knowledge graphs, and scraped datasets. Overlaps with Gaffa on AI-powered structured extraction but operates at a much larger scale with a dataset-first business model.
• Import.io: Import.io provides enterprise web data extraction, including managed services and pipelines for large organizations. Comparable in underlying capability (browser-based extraction) but targets enterprise buyers with a services-heavy GTM model.

Market position

Strengths5 records

Weaknesses5 records

Competitive moat4 records

Key risks6 records

Key highlights7 records

Customer concentration

• LinkedInlinkedin.com/company/gaffa-web-automation

Revenue estimate

Valuation estimate

Number of profiles

Profiles1 record

Funding overview

Funding rounds

Investors

Funding detail is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

M&A

Investments

M&A and investment is available on the Subscription and Enterprise plan.Contact sales →

Frequently asked questions about Gaffa: Web Automation API