How to Scrape Open Collective: Financial and Contributor Data Guide
Learn how to scrape Open Collective for financial transactions, contributor lists, and project funding data. Extract transparent insights for market research.
Anti-Bot Protection Detected
- Cloudflare
- Enterprise-grade WAF and bot management. Uses JavaScript challenges, CAPTCHAs, and behavioral analysis. Requires browser automation with stealth settings.
- Rate Limiting
- Limits requests per IP/session over time. Can be bypassed with rotating proxies, request delays, and distributed scraping.
- WAF
About Open Collective
Learn what Open Collective offers and what valuable data can be extracted from it.
About Open Collective
Open Collective is a unique financial and legal platform designed to provide transparency for community-led organizations, open-source software projects, and neighborhood associations. By acting as a decentralized funding tool, it allows 'collectives' to raise money and manage expenses without the need for a formal legal entity, often utilizing fiscal hosts for administrative support. Major tech projects like Babel and Webpack rely on this platform to manage their community-funded ecosystems.
The platform is renowned for its radical transparency. Every transaction, whether a donation from a major corporation or a small expense for a community meetup, is logged and publicly visible. This provides a wealth of data regarding the financial health and spending habits of some of the world's most critical open-source dependencies.
Scraping Open Collective is highly valuable for organizations looking to perform market research on the open-source economy. It allows users to identify corporate sponsorship leads, track developer funding trends, and audit the financial sustainability of critical software projects. The data serves as a direct window into the flow of capital within the global developer community.
Why Scrape Open Collective?
Discover the business value and use cases for extracting data from Open Collective.
Analyze the sustainability of critical open-source dependencies
Identify potential corporate sponsorship leads for B2B services
Monitor decentralized funding trends across different tech stacks
Conduct academic research on peer-to-peer financial systems
Audit non-profit and community group spending for transparency
Track competitor involvement in community project sponsorships
Scraping Challenges
Technical challenges you may encounter when scraping Open Collective.
Managing complex GraphQL queries for deep nested data extraction
Handling dynamic Next.js hydration and infinite scroll pagination
Bypassing Cloudflare protection on high-frequency requests
Dealing with strict rate limits on both API and web endpoints
Scrape Open Collective with AI
No coding required. Extract data in minutes with AI-powered automation.
How It Works
Describe What You Need
Tell the AI what data you want to extract from Open Collective. Just type it in plain language — no coding or selectors needed.
AI Extracts the Data
Our artificial intelligence navigates Open Collective, handles dynamic content, and extracts exactly what you asked for.
Get Your Data
Receive clean, structured data ready to export as CSV, JSON, or send directly to your apps and workflows.
Why Use AI for Scraping
AI makes it easy to scrape Open Collective without writing any code. Our AI-powered platform uses artificial intelligence to understand what data you want — just describe it in plain language and the AI extracts it automatically.
How to scrape with AI:
- Describe What You Need: Tell the AI what data you want to extract from Open Collective. Just type it in plain language — no coding or selectors needed.
- AI Extracts the Data: Our artificial intelligence navigates Open Collective, handles dynamic content, and extracts exactly what you asked for.
- Get Your Data: Receive clean, structured data ready to export as CSV, JSON, or send directly to your apps and workflows.
Why use AI for scraping:
- Extract complex financial data without writing GraphQL queries
- Automatically handle JavaScript rendering and infinite scroll
- Schedule recurring runs to monitor project budget changes
- Bypass anti-bot measures through distributed cloud execution
No-Code Web Scrapers for Open Collective
Point-and-click alternatives to AI-powered scraping
Several no-code tools like Browse.ai, Octoparse, Axiom, and ParseHub can help you scrape Open Collective. These tools use visual interfaces to select elements, but they come with trade-offs compared to AI-powered solutions.
Typical Workflow with No-Code Tools
Common Challenges
Learning curve
Understanding selectors and extraction logic takes time
Selectors break
Website changes can break your entire workflow
Dynamic content issues
JavaScript-heavy sites often require complex workarounds
CAPTCHA limitations
Most tools require manual intervention for CAPTCHAs
IP blocking
Aggressive scraping can get your IP banned
No-Code Web Scrapers for Open Collective
Several no-code tools like Browse.ai, Octoparse, Axiom, and ParseHub can help you scrape Open Collective. These tools use visual interfaces to select elements, but they come with trade-offs compared to AI-powered solutions.
Typical Workflow with No-Code Tools
- Install browser extension or sign up for the platform
- Navigate to the target website and open the tool
- Point-and-click to select data elements you want to extract
- Configure CSS selectors for each data field
- Set up pagination rules to scrape multiple pages
- Handle CAPTCHAs (often requires manual solving)
- Configure scheduling for automated runs
- Export data to CSV, JSON, or connect via API
Common Challenges
- Learning curve: Understanding selectors and extraction logic takes time
- Selectors break: Website changes can break your entire workflow
- Dynamic content issues: JavaScript-heavy sites often require complex workarounds
- CAPTCHA limitations: Most tools require manual intervention for CAPTCHAs
- IP blocking: Aggressive scraping can get your IP banned
Code Examples
import requests
# The Open Collective GraphQL endpoint
url = 'https://api.opencollective.com/graphql/v2'
# GraphQL query to get basic info about a collective
query = '''
query {
collective(slug: "webpack") {
name
stats {
totalAmountReceived { value }
balance { value }
}
}
}
'''
headers = {'Content-Type': 'application/json'}
try:
# Sending POST request to the API
response = requests.post(url, json={'query': query}, headers=headers)
response.raise_for_status()
data = response.json()
# Extracting and printing the name and balance
collective = data['data']['collective']
print(f"Name: {collective['name']}")
print(f"Balance: {collective['stats']['balance']['value']}")
except Exception as e:
print(f"An error occurred: {e}")When to Use
Best for static HTML pages where content is loaded server-side. The fastest and simplest approach when JavaScript rendering isn't required.
Advantages
- ●Fastest execution (no browser overhead)
- ●Lowest resource consumption
- ●Easy to parallelize with asyncio
- ●Great for APIs and static pages
Limitations
- ●Cannot execute JavaScript
- ●Fails on SPAs and dynamic content
- ●May struggle with complex anti-bot systems
How to Scrape Open Collective with Code
Python + Requests
import requests
# The Open Collective GraphQL endpoint
url = 'https://api.opencollective.com/graphql/v2'
# GraphQL query to get basic info about a collective
query = '''
query {
collective(slug: "webpack") {
name
stats {
totalAmountReceived { value }
balance { value }
}
}
}
'''
headers = {'Content-Type': 'application/json'}
try:
# Sending POST request to the API
response = requests.post(url, json={'query': query}, headers=headers)
response.raise_for_status()
data = response.json()
# Extracting and printing the name and balance
collective = data['data']['collective']
print(f"Name: {collective['name']}")
print(f"Balance: {collective['stats']['balance']['value']}")
except Exception as e:
print(f"An error occurred: {e}")Python + Playwright
from playwright.sync_api import sync_playwright
def scrape_opencollective():
with sync_playwright() as p:
# Launching browser with JS support
browser = p.chromium.launch(headless=True)
page = browser.new_page()
page.goto('https://opencollective.com/discover')
# Wait for collective cards to load
page.wait_for_selector('.CollectiveCard')
# Extract data from the DOM
collectives = page.query_selector_all('.CollectiveCard')
for c in collectives:
name = c.query_selector('h2').inner_text()
print(f'Found project: {name}')
browser.close()
scrape_opencollective()Python + Scrapy
import scrapy
import json
class OpenCollectiveSpider(scrapy.Spider):
name = 'opencollective'
start_urls = ['https://opencollective.com/webpack']
def parse(self, response):
# Open Collective uses Next.js; data is often inside a script tag
next_data = response.xpath('//script[@id="__NEXT_DATA__"]/text()').get()
if next_data:
parsed_data = json.loads(next_data)
collective = parsed_data['props']['pageProps']['collective']
yield {
'name': collective.get('name'),
'balance': collective.get('stats', {}).get('balance'),
'currency': collective.get('currency')
}Node.js + Puppeteer
const puppeteer = require('puppeteer');
(async () => {
const browser = await puppeteer.launch();
const page = await browser.newPage();
await page.goto('https://opencollective.com/discover');
// Wait for the dynamic content to load
await page.waitForSelector('.CollectiveCard');
// Map over elements to extract names
const data = await page.evaluate(() => {
return Array.from(document.querySelectorAll('.CollectiveCard')).map(el => ({
name: el.querySelector('h2').innerText
}));
});
console.log(data);
await browser.close();
})();What You Can Do With Open Collective Data
Explore practical applications and insights from Open Collective data.
Open Source Growth Forecasting
Identify trending technologies by tracking financial growth rates of specific collective categories.
How to implement:
- 1Extract monthly revenue for top projects in specific tags
- 2Calculate compound annual growth rates (CAGR)
- 3Visualize project funding health to predict tech adoption
Use Automatio to extract data from Open Collective and build these applications without writing code.
What You Can Do With Open Collective Data
- Open Source Growth Forecasting
Identify trending technologies by tracking financial growth rates of specific collective categories.
- Extract monthly revenue for top projects in specific tags
- Calculate compound annual growth rates (CAGR)
- Visualize project funding health to predict tech adoption
- Lead Generation for SaaS
Identify well-funded projects that may need developer tools, hosting, or professional services.
- Filter collectives by budget and total amount raised
- Extract project descriptions and external website URLs
- Verify the tech stack through linked GitHub repositories
- Corporate Philanthropy Audit
Track where major corporations are spending their open-source contribution budgets.
- Scrape contributor lists for top projects
- Filter for organizational profiles vs individual profiles
- Aggregate contribution amounts by corporate entity
- Community Impact Research
Analyze how decentralized groups distribute their funds to understand social impact.
- Scrape the full transaction ledger for a specific collective
- Categorize expenses (travel, salaries, hardware)
- Generate reports on resource allocation within community groups
- Developer Recruitment Pipeline
Find active leaders in specific ecosystems based on their community management and contribution history.
- Scrape member lists of key technical collectives
- Cross-reference contributors with their public social profiles
- Identify active maintainers for high-level outreach
Supercharge your workflow with AI Automation
Automatio combines the power of AI agents, web automation, and smart integrations to help you accomplish more in less time.
Pro Tips for Scraping Open Collective
Expert advice for successfully extracting data from Open Collective.
Prioritize the official GraphQL API over web scraping for more stable and structured results.
When scraping the front-end, use the 'data-cy' attributes in your selectors for better stability during site updates.
Implement a randomized delay between 2-5 seconds to mimic human browsing and avoid rate-limiting triggers.
Use rotating residential proxies if you need to perform high-volume searches through the /discover page.
Check the robots.txt file to ensure your scraping frequency respects the site's allowed crawl-delay parameters.
Testimonials
What Our Users Say
Join thousands of satisfied users who have transformed their workflow
Jonathan Kogan
Co-Founder/CEO, rpatools.io
Automatio is one of the most used for RPA Tools both internally and externally. It saves us countless hours of work and we realized this could do the same for other startups and so we choose Automatio for most of our automation needs.
Mohammed Ibrahim
CEO, qannas.pro
I have used many tools over the past 5 years, Automatio is the Jack of All trades.. !! it could be your scraping bot in the morning and then it becomes your VA by the noon and in the evening it does your automations.. its amazing!
Ben Bressington
CTO, AiChatSolutions
Automatio is fantastic and simple to use to extract data from any website. This allowed me to replace a developer and do tasks myself as they only take a few minutes to setup and forget about it. Automatio is a game changer!
Sarah Chen
Head of Growth, ScaleUp Labs
We've tried dozens of automation tools, but Automatio stands out for its flexibility and ease of use. Our team productivity increased by 40% within the first month of adoption.
David Park
Founder, DataDriven.io
The AI-powered features in Automatio are incredible. It understands context and adapts to changes in websites automatically. No more broken scrapers!
Emily Rodriguez
Marketing Director, GrowthMetrics
Automatio transformed our lead generation process. What used to take our team days now happens automatically in minutes. The ROI is incredible.
Jonathan Kogan
Co-Founder/CEO, rpatools.io
Automatio is one of the most used for RPA Tools both internally and externally. It saves us countless hours of work and we realized this could do the same for other startups and so we choose Automatio for most of our automation needs.
Mohammed Ibrahim
CEO, qannas.pro
I have used many tools over the past 5 years, Automatio is the Jack of All trades.. !! it could be your scraping bot in the morning and then it becomes your VA by the noon and in the evening it does your automations.. its amazing!
Ben Bressington
CTO, AiChatSolutions
Automatio is fantastic and simple to use to extract data from any website. This allowed me to replace a developer and do tasks myself as they only take a few minutes to setup and forget about it. Automatio is a game changer!
Sarah Chen
Head of Growth, ScaleUp Labs
We've tried dozens of automation tools, but Automatio stands out for its flexibility and ease of use. Our team productivity increased by 40% within the first month of adoption.
David Park
Founder, DataDriven.io
The AI-powered features in Automatio are incredible. It understands context and adapts to changes in websites automatically. No more broken scrapers!
Emily Rodriguez
Marketing Director, GrowthMetrics
Automatio transformed our lead generation process. What used to take our team days now happens automatically in minutes. The ROI is incredible.
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Frequently Asked Questions About Open Collective
Find answers to common questions about Open Collective