Launch HN: Channel3 (YC S25) – A database of every product on the internet
It’s surprisingly hard to find good product data. If you want your software to recommend products and deep-link to merchants, you’ll quickly discover that the data you need—clean titles, normalized attributes, deduped listings, current prices and inventory, variant options, images, and brand info—is not just messy; it’s also spread across a long, long tail of retailers, and often lives behind advanced bot-detection systems.
We ran into this problem while building an AI teacher that could recommend relevant supplies. We asked Exa for products, but got back articles, not structured data. Same for Tavily and Bing (deprecated as of 8/13/25). And we got rejected from affiliate programs, who suggested we come back with 1000s of TikTok followers. Channel3 is the API we wished we had.
Product detail pages (PDPs) usually present the main item alongside recommendations. We use computer vision to isolate the main product and find its attributes, like title and price. We apply the same logic to the rest of the PDPs on the domain.
Products are often sold across multiple retailers, with no guarantee they’ll be labeled consistently. We collapse products across the web into a canonicalized set by using LLMs and multimodal embeddings to actually understand each product.
To normalize everything into a schema that tries to be both minimal and extensible, we have to be opinionated. Are a $50 10” and $60 12” skillet the same product? Probably not, but the S/M/L variants of a T-shirt are. Our goal is that any product you’d search for specifically is treated as its own product.
We process a massive amount of data. We quickly ran out of room on our Cloudflare Vectorize indices and moved to the brand-new AWS S3 Vectors platform, syncing to OpenSearch for faster response times and more dynamic filtering. We hit rate limits constantly, so we spread our work over multiple cloud providers and AI models.
You can search things like “outdoor grill, less than $1000”, or “sweat-resistant, wireless running earbuds”, or "women's jeans from Paige that look like [https://www.gap.com/webcontent/0020/666/799/cn20666799.jpg]”. Products come back as JSON with title, brand, images, price, specs, etc.
Developers earn commission on sales they drive (averaging 5%). Channel3 takes a cut. We want you to earn way more money from Channel3 than you spend on it. We win when you win.
We provide an API, SDK (Typescript and Python), and MCP. We offer 1000 free searches, and charge $7/1000 searches after that. You can view expected commissions per-brand on our dashboard.
So far, products are US-only (sorry! we will expand). We’re live with millions of products and hundreds of developers.
To get started, make a free account at https://trychannel3.com, then select which brands you’d like to sell (choose from 50k+ or request your own), generate an API key, and start selling and earning.
We’d really appreciate feedback from this community. If you’ve built product search before, what did we miss in the schema? If you’ve tried to add commerce to an app, what blocked you? If you tried to build this yourself, what did you learn? Are there endpoints you wish existed (e.g. price alerts, back-in-stock webhooks, product feed)? For any suggestions, we’re all ears.
We’ll be in the thread all day to answer questions, share more technical detail, and...
39 comments
[ 4.2 ms ] story [ 61.4 ms ] threadYou say that commissions average 5%, but what is the variability and where does it come from?
Last, a bit of feedback about the product.
I tried searching "nintendo switch 2" on your homepage and the results that came up kind of sketched me out. You mention that the products are US-only, but the first result clearly says "hong kong" in the title. And the store listed is "My Nintendo Store PT"; is that the official store? When I google that it takes me to the Portuguese version of the nintendo website, and that makes me even more confused.
The second result for the same search appears to be a dress, which is obviously completely unrelated to video games in general.
EDIT: I'm noticing irrelevant results for many queries. Searching "plain white pillowcase", the third result is a t-shirt, the seventh result is a dress, and the eleventh result is a light bulb.
Searching "men's wallet" the very first result is an outdoor picnic table.
As someone who has worked in e-retail, this catalog seems to have a lot of momentum.
We're working with enterprise customers now that want to use our system to dedupe all their gnarly business data, ground it to real legal entities, enrich it with base insights, then are asking for further data points more from a risk and due diligence standpoint.
Product information has come up repeatedly, but as you clearly know, that is a beast in itself that I don't think we'll ever tackle. For context, I helped build out the product data infra at https://www.wiser.com, and I'm not inclined to spend my time categorizing and building the taxonomy for pots, pans, and towels again.
I'm going to try out the product and happy to chat further if you think there's an opp to collaborate in some way. My email is in my profile.
I had tried to sign up for affiliate sales a while back, but:
It is complicated to sign up for it – depending on the vendor you have to fill in a number of forms, or sign up via a different affiliate network to even use them.
Wait times for a response are long – I remember some networks or individual sellers got back to me months later.
There's a high bar to entry – I had a tiny website, so I didn't get approved, but I had a good CTR. I eventually had to shut down the website since I realized there was no viable option to monetization and was just burning money on name registration + hosting.
My website was also not in the blog-space, i.e. I didn't do reviews, but I did offer good info, and Amazon for example specifically denied me affiliate permissions because of this.
I might revive the website and see if it'll work again with you guys. This is a path to monetization that could make it sustainable. Thanks and good luck!
1) Are there plans to allow Devs to do the same?
2) why wouldn't you open the limit beyond 1000 free as long as you are making a rev share
3) does this pick from Shopify products/stores?
Imo the agentic loop isn't really closed unless you allow agents to pay and paywalls today aren't agent friendly. Tokenized cards, 16 digital cards. Perhaps but this involves high trust from users. Which means you are left with guiding users to the link and hoping they buy the product.
4) partnering with merchants where cards are already tokenized maybe your best converting potential customer base. But it's easy to do evil here, or loose trust without guardrails.
5) I would come up with a process to incentivize adding products to the ecosystem. However tiny the reward.
Lot of opportunity. Nice pitch. Good luck!
Would try this out of you can increase the 1k limit to something that is a win:win
the searches in case you want to take a look: “dog collar” and “cat scratching post”
good luck with the product!