Northbound Data
I am in China, I work in Chinese and English, and I mark which of my own findings I could not verify. Supplier checks, market research, and data tooling — measured, dated, and published before you pay for anything.
Three production tools live on the Apify marketplace, plus an open-source client and a documentation site. All publicly verifiable — the links go to the real thing, not to screenshots.
Four habits that show up in every deliverable. They are the reason the numbers above exist at all.
Each job writes a summary with attempts, successes, failures and a failure rate. You audit the tool with its own output instead of taking my word for it.
Feed in 40 accounts and some will not exist. Those are reported separately, by name, so your error rate stays honest and you learn which inputs to clean.
No hard-coded API ids or fixed JSON paths. Data is found by structural signature, so a site refactor degrades the output instead of silently returning zero rows.
One config change cut a run from 150s/$0.127 to 3.3s/$0.0086 — 45x faster, 15x cheaper, identical output. I find those before you pay for them.
Open any of these. They are published products with real schemas, real pricing and real documentation.
| Project | What it does | Notable |
|---|---|---|
| Threads Scraper | Posts, replies, profiles and keyword search in one run | Merges 4 profile tabs and 5 search surfaces for 2.4–4.4x more unique results than a single-entry-point scraper |
| Threads Search Scraper | Keyword search, deduplicated across keywords | A post matching three keywords is billed once, not three times |
| Threads Creator Finder | Creator discovery ranked by engagement on a topic | Follower-band filter isolates micro-influencers; ranks by topic engagement, not follower count |
| threads-data-client | MIT client, zero dependencies, Node 18+ | Handles run start, polling, dataset pagination and tier-aware cost estimation |
| Measurement reference | Public write-up of what the platform actually returns | Includes the limits that make the tools less attractive — because a buyer should know them first |
| China Licence Checker | Free tool: validate a Chinese business licence code offline | Tells a buyer whether a supplier is a company or one individual — a distinction English materials never surface. Runs entirely in the browser |
| Sample supplier report | A full worked example of what a verification report contains | Every finding filed as confirmed, inferred, or could not check — including three things I could not verify |
| Reading a Chinese Business Licence | Field guide: nine fields, and what each one really means | Covers the two that settle factory-vs-middleman, and the money figure on the licence that is not money |
| The 62x Blame Gap | Bilingual review analysis: one game, two audiences 60 points apart | Documents my own method error and the correction, plus a section on what the analysis still cannot tell you |
Node.jsPythonPlaywrightREST APIsApify SDKDockerHTML/CSSJSON SchemaTechnical writing
robots.txt I have not checked — I check before quoting, and I will tell you if the answer is noA short, predictable loop. No surprises in the invoice.
| Step | What happens | You get |
|---|---|---|
| 1. Scope | You describe the outcome. I check feasibility, including the target's terms and defences. | A yes/no and a fixed quote — or an honest "this cannot be done well" |
| 2. Sample | I deliver a small real slice first. | Actual output to inspect before committing to the full run |
| 3. Build | Full implementation with a self-reporting reliability summary. | Working tool plus its own measured failure rate |
| 4. Handover | Documentation written for someone who was not in the conversation. | Something maintainable after I am gone |