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.
How does WhatRuns.com make money?
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Re: How does WhatRuns.com make money?
#2They 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.
Re: How does WhatRuns.com make money?
#3I think their TOS is fairly revealing on how they could benefit from it being free: https://www.whatruns.com/terms
See Data and Advertising
Re: How does WhatRuns.com make money?
#4I 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.
Re: How does WhatRuns.com make money?
#5I 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...