Good Afternoon Everyone,
This is not promotion, this is a genuine post, and feel free to ignore if this does not concern your web scraping activities.
Some of you might remember adultdatalink from the pornstar stock market index post I made here a while back. It had scrapers that turned 20+ sites into clean JSON, performer and keyword analytics, scraping projects, and some video tools.
After about two years I'm shutting the hosted service down.
Instead of letting the code rot on a hard drive, I'm making it open source under MIT: https://github.com/adultdatalink/adultdatalink-public
First, I owe some people an apology. The API went down at the end of April and I never said anything.
Some of you noticed, and there's even a thread on webdev asking whether it was dead.
I stepped away from it without a proper shutdown notice, and anyone who had built something on top of it deserved better. This post is the notice I should have written back then. Since the code is now public, anyone who depended on it can run it themselves.
That thread also said the user numbers I posted before were probably fake, and that most people just signed up and connected without really using it. That's not correct. 1,635 people signed up, and 1,008 of them generated API keys. Signups started slow, with 17 in March 2025, peaked at 193 in December 2025, and stayed somewhere between 100 and 190 a month after that.
Our own request logs captured about 2.45 million API calls. Almost 2 million of those came between December and April alone, from 303 different API keys, so roughly 430K requests a month. The busiest single day was 25,935 requests. 97.8% of requests came back successful, with a median response time of about a second, which I'm pretty happy with considering every call was scraping a live third party site.
On the Cloudflare side, the peak was 3.9 million requests and 36 GB in one 30 day window back in March 2025, from almost 100 countries. A month and a half before that, the same window showed 195K requests. When I added the video tools, bandwidth went up to 407 GB in a single month, and Brazil, Germany, Canada and Spain suddenly became some of the biggest users. Server errors stayed around 0.05% the whole time. Pornhub was by far the most requested source, followed by Eporner, XVideos, xHamster and XNXX.
So why shut it down?
It just didn't make much money & sunk cost fallacy.
I spent so much time building this that I didn't want to just walk away from it fully, but there comes a where you cut losses on bad investment.
The usage was real but very concentrated. In the latest logs, one integration made about 80% of all requests, and the top 10 keys made 94%. A lot of people tried it, and a handful actually built on it. In this niche, payment processors, ad networks and app stores all make things harder than they need to be, and the scrapers need constant fixing every time a site changes something. Between hosting and my time, there wasn't much left over. I could keep it going as a small side thing, but I'd rather put the code out there and let people build stuff with it than keep it to myself.
The other thing I want to talk about is how much AI has changed this.
I built and ran the whole thing basically by myself. That was twelve FastAPI services covering the scraping API, an analytics engine, accounts, payments, logging, a CDN, storage and an ops dashboard, plus the scrapers, a YOLO annotation pipeline, and the stock style indexes.
A few years ago that would have taken a small team. AI coding tools have made the barrier to entry for SWE alot lower. Building it is not really the hard part anymore, finding people who will pay for it, getting it in front of them, and keeping it maintained is the hard part, and that's where this one came up short.
And also its really not hard for someone to just copy your shit, so software moats are very difficult to maintain IMO nowadays unless paired with hardware.
THE REPO
The repo has 2 pieces. The first is the adult content API & analytics engine.
Everything is configured with environment variable and it runs with pip and uvicorn.
It's archived and I won't be maintaining it, so fork it and make it your own. Some scrapers will break as the sites change, that's just how it goes.
Please read the README part about terms of service and not exposing the proxy routes to the public internet. And obviously it's 18+ only.
Huge thank you to everyone who signed up, built something on the API, sent feedback, reported bugs. I learned a ton doing this and had a lot of fun with it.