Quickstart

Let your agent set it up

If you code with an agent, give it this prompt instead of reading on. It reads our endpoint list, looks at your project and makes the first call itself.

Prompt

Read https://hydrafetch.com/agents.md and set up Hydrafetch in this project.

Use the HYDRAFETCH_API_KEY environment variable, never a hardcoded key. Then make one scrape call against a URL that is relevant to what this project does, and show me the markdown it returns and what it cost.

Want to know where Hydrafetch fits in an existing codebase? Use this prompt instead. It reads the repository and lists the scraping code we would replace, with file paths and a credit estimate.

1. Get your API key

Sign up at app.hydrafetch.com and verify your email. Your workspace comes with a key ready to copy and 500 free credits for 30 days. The key starts with hf_. Treat it like a password.

2. Scrape your first page

Send a URL to /v1/web/scrape with your key in the X-API-Key header. You get clean Markdown back by default.

curl -X POST https://api.hydrafetch.com/v1/web/scrape \
  -H "X-API-Key: hf_your_key_here" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "url": "https://example.com" }'

const res = await fetch("https://api.hydrafetch.com/v1/web/scrape", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: {
    "X-API-Key": "hf_your_key_here",
    "Content-Type": "application/json",
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({ url: "https://example.com" }),
});
const { data } = await res.json();
console.log(data.markdown);

import requests

res = requests.post(
    "https://api.hydrafetch.com/v1/web/scrape",
    headers={"X-API-Key": "hf_your_key_here"},
    json={"url": "https://example.com"},
)
print(res.json()["data"]["markdown"])

Prefer a library? There are SDKs for Node, Python, Go, Rust, Ruby and PHP.

3. Read the response

A scrape returns the page, what the page says about itself, how far to trust the result, and what the call cost:

{
  "data": {
    "url": "https://example.com",
    "finalUrl": "https://example.com/",
    "redirected": false,
    "status": 200,
    "cached": false,
    "metadata": {
      "title": "Example Domain",
      "pageType": "article",
      "wordCount": 19,
      "description": "Illustrative examples in documents.",
      "language": "en",
      "author": null,
      "siteName": null,
      "publishedTime": null,
      "modifiedTime": null,
      "image": null
    },
    "quality": { "confidence": 0.94, "complete": true, "blocked": false },
    "usage": { "creditsUsed": 1, "creditsRemaining": 499, "freshness": "fresh" },
    "markdown": "# Example Domain\n\nThis domain is for use in illustrative examples..."
  }
}

markdown is the page’s content, cleaned of navigation and boilerplate.
metadata is what the page declares about itself. A field the page does not publish is null.
quality says how far to trust the result. See Extraction quality.
usage is what the call cost and what is left. freshness is cache when the page came from a recent copy, which costs the same.

4. Ask for more

Add formats to get more than Markdown in the same call:

curl -X POST https://api.hydrafetch.com/v1/web/scrape \
  -H "X-API-Key: hf_your_key_here" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://example.com",
    "formats": ["markdown", "links", "structured"]
  }'

Next steps

Authentication

Keys, workspaces and what happens when a key is wrong.

Formats

Markdown, structured data, links, summaries and more.

Crawl a whole site

Go from one page to every page.

API Reference

Every endpoint, with a live playground.

Get started

Core concepts

Web Scraping

Web Extraction

Data indexes

Let your agent set it up

1. Get your API key

2. Scrape your first page

3. Read the response

4. Ask for more

Next steps

Authentication

Formats

Crawl a whole site

API Reference