How does WhatRuns.com make money?

4 points by n1try 5y ago ↗ HN

I just found https://www.whatruns.com/ and also found a 3-year-old HN discussion (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=15098028) on this tool. I really like it, but I just can't figure out what the operators of that site get out of it? It's free, there's no premium version and they claim to not collect any data. I'm a bit sceptical.

4 comments

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[dead] t0mmyb0y 5y ago ↗

They probably get business. I tried a number of tools like this in the past and found that most devs put them out for people to use, while they used them to drive their business helping people create sites like their competitors.

staller 5y ago ↗

I think their TOS is fairly revealing on how they could benefit from it being free: https://www.whatruns.com/terms

See Data and Advertising

Gustomaximus 5y ago ↗

I use a similar site https://builtwith.com/ frequently. They have plans to get additional information.

These guys might be trying to scale until they can offer something more like this.

Also the obvious thing would be to sell data back to enterprise.

justaguyhere 5y ago ↗

I am actually interested in what goes into building such a product. It would take tremendous resources to crawl millions of websites, not to mention fingerprinting tons of libraries and accounting for all the edge cases...