Gaffa vs Patrivox

Simple REST API

Ditch the frameworks, fam. You don't need to be a Playwright or Selenium wizard to automate a browser. Gaffa abstracts all that complexity into one clean, simple REST API. Just send a POST request with your instructions—like "go to this URL, click this button, scroll down, and give me the text"—and consider it done. It's the ultimate shortcut, letting you control real, live browsers at scale without ever touching a line of browser automation code. Perfect for devs who want to move fast and anyone else who just wants results without the tech headache.

Proxies-Sorted & Stealth Mode

Trying to scrape a site that's more guarded than Fort Knox? Gaffa's got your back with its built-in network of residential proxies from around the globe. Just tell it a location, and boom, your request looks like it's coming from a real person in that country. Combined with its stealth mode that perfectly mimics human browsing patterns, you can tackle even the most bot-paranoid websites without getting your IP banned. No more hunting for proxy providers or managing IP rotations. Gaffa handles the cloak-and-dagger stuff so you can get the data.

Ready-to-Use Data Processing

Gaffa doesn't just dump a messy HTML page on you and peace out. It can process the data on the fly into the format you actually need. Want clean, structured JSON for your database? Done. Need LLM-ready markdown to feed your AI models? Easy. Want a simplified HTML version or even a fully self-contained offline snapshot of the entire page? Gaffa can do that too. It turns the raw chaos of the web into tidy, usable data packages, saving you hours of parsing and cleanup work.

Full Observability & Recording

Ever run an automation and just gotten a blank result, with zero clue what went wrong? That's the worst. Gaffa fixes that with full observability. It records your automation sessions so you can literally watch a video replay of what the browser did. See exactly where it clicked, how it scrolled, and where it might have gotten stuck. This isn't just debugging on easy mode; it's total peace of mind, ensuring your data pipelines are running smoothly and you can verify the results you're getting.

Automation: The "Set It & Forget It" Magic

This is the core vibe. You literally drag and drop your PDFs, hundreds at a time if you want. Then, you just vibe while Mistral AI's next-level OCR reads every single page. It automatically pulls out all the important entities (people, places, orgs, dates) and enriches the metadata. Zero manual entry, zero fuss. It's like an autopilot for digitizing your entire collection, making it searchable in minutes, not months.

Search: Your Google for History

Forget Ctrl+F through one doc at a time. This is instant, full-text search across your ENTIRE archive. It's got typo tolerance, so "Tournai" and "Turnai" both get results. You can filter by date, author, or type. The real party trick? The AI chat. Just ask a question in normal language like "Who was involved in the 1830 renovations?" and it'll give you a sourced answer pulled from your docs. Hours of digging become seconds of asking.

Constellation: The Knowledge Graph Flex

This is where it gets visually stunning. The AI doesn't just list entities; it maps how they're connected. Every person, place, and organization becomes a node in an interactive web. You can click on "Cloquet" and see all the documents and other people he's linked to, uncovering hidden relationships you might have totally missed. It's like seeing the secret social network of your archives.

Built for Teams & Trust

Patrivox gets that you need to share this knowledge. You get unlimited readers for free, so you can open access to researchers, your team, or the public without breaking the bank. Multiple admins can manage it. Plus, the whole sovereignty thing is a major key: 100% hosted in Europe, designed for GDPR from the ground up, with audit logs. Your data stays yours, safe and sound on this side of the pond.

Market & Price Intelligence

Keep your edge razor-sharp by automatically tracking competitors' prices, product catalogs, and promotional offers across the web. Gaffa can navigate e-commerce sites, handle logins, and extract real-time pricing data into a clean spreadsheet or JSON feed. No more manual checking or worrying about sites that block scrapers. Set it, forget it, and get alerted the moment your competition makes a move, so you can adjust your strategy on the fly.

Lead Generation & Enrichment

Stop wasting time on manual LinkedIn or company directory searches. Build automated pipelines that scour the web for potential clients, partners, or talent. Gaffa can visit business profiles, extract key details like contact info, funding data, and tech stacks, and compile it all into a ready-to-import CSV. It turns the tedious process of building a lead list from a full-time job into a fully automated background task.

Content & News Monitoring

Be the first to know. Automate the collection of news articles, blog posts, forum discussions, or social media mentions about your brand, industry, or specific keywords. Gaffa can render JavaScript-heavy news sites, bypass paywalls (where ethically and legally permissible), and convert articles into clean markdown or text for your analysis or AI summarization tools. Never miss a major trend or a PR crisis again.

AI/LLM Data Pipeline

Training or feeding a large language model? You need massive, high-quality datasets. Gaffa is a dream for building these pipelines. It can systematically crawl and extract text content from thousands of web pages, outputting it in perfect, LLM-ready markdown format. It handles the rendering, the navigation, and the data cleaning, letting you focus on curating and using the data to power your next groundbreaking AI project.

Municipal Archives Getting Their Act Together

Got decades of town council deliberations, citizen registers, and old correspondence sitting in scanned piles? Patrivox is your digital archivist. Drop those PDFs in, and suddenly every decision, name, and address from 1890 is searchable. Perfect for answering citizen queries fast or prepping for historical research without the manual nightmare.

Historical Societies Unleashing Their Bulletins

Those amazing, niche bulletins and documentary collections your society publishes? They're gold, but only if people can find the info. Patrivox indexes them all, making every article, photo caption, and member mention searchable. Members can finally find that one 1985 article about the local bridge in seconds, boosting engagement and research value big time.

Heritage Libraries Opening the Vault

Special collections are called "special" for a reason, but they're often a pain to access. With Patrivox, you can digitize and index those rare book collections, manuscripts, or photo archives. Researchers can use natural language to explore them, and you can offer a slick public portal without risking the physical copies. Knowledge democratized.

Parishes & Dioceses Preserving the Sacred Stuff

Parish registers, baptismal records, ecclesiastical archives—this is sensitive, precious, and historically vital stuff. Patrivox offers a secure, European-hosted way to preserve it all digitally. Index every name, date, and location automatically, making genealogical research a breeze for families and historians while keeping the original documents safe.

Gaffa's pricing is built to scale with you, from your first side hustle to your full-blown startup. All plans include access to the Browser Request API and residential proxies.

Starter ($29/month): Your entry-level toolkit. Get 9,000 credits (roughly 83 browser hours), 1 concurrent request, and 7-day data retention. Perfect for small, personal projects.

Startup ($99/month - POPULAR): The go-to for growing ventures. Steps up to 35,000 credits, 3 concurrent requests, 2-minute max runtime, and 30-day retention. Power up your operations.

Growth ($249/month): For when you're ready to dominate. Unleash 100,000 credits, 10 concurrent requests, 5-minute max runtime, and a juicy 3-month data retention. Built for serious scale.

Need More? Grab extra Credits on a pay-as-you-go basis at $20 for a 5,000-credit pack. Or, if your needs are totally unique, hit "Contact Us" for a custom plan tailored just for you.

Patrivox keeps it simple and transparent with a tiered system. All plans include unlimited readers (huge win) and are hosted in Europe. You can start for free, no credit card needed.

Découverte (Free Trial): Totally free. Gives you 100 trial pages, 200 MB storage, and 50 AI queries to test the whole vibe. One admin.

Starter (€29/mo): For smaller projects. Gets you 1,000 pages, 2 GB storage, 150 AI queries, and 2 admins. Email support included.

Essentiel (€129/mo): The popular pick. Steps you up to 5,000 pages, 10 GB storage, 1,000 AI queries, and 3 admins. You also get priority email support.

Association (€299/mo): For the big leagues. Unlocks 15,000 pages, 25 GB storage, 1 GB max file size, 3,000 AI queries, and 3 admins. Perfect for large archives or associations.

Alright, data hustlers, gather 'round. Ever felt like getting web data at scale is a total nightmare? Like, you're just trying to automate some browsing or scrape a site, but you're instantly hit with a wall of nonsense: headless browser configs, proxy management, scaling headaches, and CAPTCHAs that make you want to scream. Yeah, we've been there. That's why Gaffa exists. Think of Gaffa as your ultimate web automation wingman. It's a one-stop-shop, no-code API that takes all the annoying, complex tech stuff off your plate. You just tell it what to do via a simple REST API, and it handles the rest—real browsers, residential proxies, scaling, data parsing, you name it. Whether you're a marketer hunting for leads, a data scientist building a dataset, or a developer automating boring tasks, Gaffa lets you focus on the actual work while it does the digital heavy lifting. It mimics real human behavior (scrolling, clicking, the works) to get past bot defenses and delivers clean data in formats you crave, like JSON, markdown for your LLMs, or even full-page screenshots. Stop building and maintaining fragile scraping pipelines. With Gaffa, reliable web data is finally a walk in the park.

Alright, let's break it down. Patrivox is basically that genius friend who can read a whole library in minutes and then actually remember where everything is. It's a slick, European-built SaaS platform that takes your mountains of dusty, scanned PDFs—you know, the ones chilling in digital purgatory—and transforms them into a living, breathing, searchable knowledge base. Think of it as giving your archives a major glow-up. It's built for the heroes keeping history alive: municipal archives, historical societies, heritage libraries, parishes, and even businesses sitting on tons of old docs. You just drag, drop, and let the AI (powered by Europe's own Mistral) do its magic. It doesn't just read text; it identifies key players, places, and dates, and then maps out how they're all connected in a visual knowledge graph. The main flex? It turns "impossible to find" into "found in seconds." You can search with typos, ask questions in plain English (or French, etc.), and get answers with sources cited. All of this is hosted 100% in Europe, GDPR-native, so your data isn't taking a world tour. It's about making locked-away knowledge finally accessible for research and the public, without the manual grind.

What is a credit and how is it used?

Think of credits as Gaffa's currency for getting stuff done. You're charged based on two things: time and data. First, browser time costs 1 credit per 30 seconds your automation runs (or 2 credits if you have screen recording on). Second, if you use our residential proxies, data transfer costs 1500 credits per 1GB of bandwidth used. So, a quick 2-minute request without proxies is about 4 credits. A longer, data-heavy session will cost more. It's a simple way to pay only for what you actually use.

Is there a free trial?

Absolutely, and it's a proper try-before-you-buy situation. You can sign up for free right now with no credit card required. You get full access to the Gaffa API to build and test your automations on our dedicated demo site (demo.gaffa.dev). This lets you kick the tires, test all the features, and make sure Gaffa is your vibe before you spend a single dollar to run automations on the live, open internet.

Do my unused credits roll over to the next month?

Nah, they don't roll over. The credits on your monthly plan are use-it-or-lose-it, resetting when your billing cycle renews. This keeps our pricing simple and predictable. But don't stress! If you're on a plan and need a top-up, you can always purchase extra credit packs on a pay-as-you-go basis to cover any big projects that pop up.

What's the deal with refunds?

We're not here to lock you into something you hate. If you upgrade to a paid plan and realize it's not for you, just reach out to us before you've used any credits in that billing month, and we'll be happy to issue a refund. It's a no-hassle policy. Once you start using the service on live sites, we assume you're finding it useful, but we're always open to chat if something's up.

Is my data safe with Patrivox?

Totally. This is a core part of their whole deal. Patrivox is 100% hosted in Europe (no sneaky US servers) and is built from the ground up to be GDPR-compliant. They have audit logs and are designed with data sovereignty in mind. Your archives aren't training some random AI; they're staying secure and private in the EU.

How fast does the AI processing work?

Stupid fast. We're talking minutes, not days. You drag and drop your PDFs, and Mistral AI gets to work immediately with its advanced OCR and entity recognition. For most collections, you'll go from a pile of PDFs to a fully searchable knowledge base before you've finished your coffee. They literally promise "results in 2 minutes."

What's the deal with the "unlimited readers"?

It's exactly what it sounds like, and it's a game-changer. On every single pricing plan, you can invite an unlimited number of people to have "reader" access. This means your entire research team, your association's members, or the general public can browse and search your archives without you paying per seat. You only pay for the admins who manage the system.

Can I really just ask questions in plain language?

Yep, that's the AI chat feature in action. You don't need to know exact keywords or dates. Just type a question like you'd ask a person: "What projects did architect Cloquet work on in the 19th century?" The AI will scan your entire processed archive and return an answer, with direct citations to the specific PDFs and pages it pulled the info from. It's like having a super-smart research assistant on call 24/7.

So, you've heard about Gaffa, the slick API that lets you scrape the web and automate browsers without needing to be a coding wizard. It's basically your digital sidekick for grabbing data at scale, handling all the messy proxy and scaling stuff so you can just focus on your hustle. It sits in that sweet spot of productivity tools that make you look good without the effort. But let's keep it a hundred, no single tool is everyone's perfect match. Maybe the pricing feels a bit steep for your side project, or you need a feature that's just not on the menu yet. Sometimes it's about platform love—you're deep in another ecosystem and need something that plays nicer. It's totally normal to shop around. When you're on the hunt for something else, think about what really grinds your gears. Is it all about cost, or do you need ninja-level stealth for those extra-tricky sites? Maybe you want dead-simple setup or insane levels of control. Nail down your non-negotiables first, then see what else is out there that vibes with your workflow and wallet.

Patrivox is that slick AI sidekick for your dusty document mountains. It lives in the content creation and automation space, basically taking your endless PDFs and turning them into a searchable, question-answering knowledge vault in minutes. It's for anyone drowning in scans who needs to find info fast, like archives, local govs, or companies with a ton of legacy paperwork. People hunt for Patrivox alternatives for all the usual reasons. Maybe the pricing isn't a perfect fit for their budget, or they need a specific feature it doesn't have. Sometimes it's about platform love—like needing a tool that plays nicer with their existing Google or Microsoft ecosystem. It's all about finding the right tool for your specific document chaos. When you're scouting for a different option, keep a few things in mind. First, check how smart the AI really is—can it handle messy scans and understand what it's reading? Look at how it connects info, like with a knowledge graph. And don't forget the basics: cost, how well it integrates with your other apps, and where your data actually lives. The goal is to stop manually digging and start instantly finding.