80Legs, a new service that is launching today at Demo09, the older counterpoint to the TechCrunch50, is out to make web-crawling both cheaper and more accesible to companies. It has long been possible to build a web crawler for personal use, but the cost was always prohibitive. Who wants to build a datacenter to merely do custom web crawling?
80Legs, funded with 400,000 in VC money from Creesis Ventures, is a SAAS web crawling solution that charges you a flat rate per million webpages crawled, and a CPU/rate to access the spidered information. All told, they just want $2 per million pages, which even the smallest company could afford. Now compare that with the hundreds of thousands of dollars needed to set up a custom data center for company.
Past its basic offering, 80Legs is offering up an application store, to allow third party developers to create the tools and plugins to filter the search results effectively. This is the brilliant move that the company is making. Instead of trying to plug ten holes with one hand, the company is attempting take over the specific custom web crawling niche, and leave the rest to others. By opening this store, they are effectively building a what will begin as a cottage industry around their product, creating a healthy community around it.
Nothing could be smarter from a business perspective.
All things considered I am more excited about this company than anything that I saw at the TechCrunch50. Indeed, assuming that its core technology is as strong as explained by the team, this company could quickly grow into a powerhouse. It fills an important hole, profits along the way, and helps to foster its own product by encouraging other companies to work with them. Color us impressed. We promise more 80Legs coverage in the future, but until then follow them on Twitter.
