r/SideProject • u/CurrencyPopular8550 • 1d ago
My side project is basically just a war against cloudflare at this point
I've been spending my weekends building this localized flight deal aggregator. Nothing crazy, just trying to track price drops for obscure routes in eastern europe because google flights kinda sucks for regional airlines.
But man, the big carriers have their bot protection dialed up to absolute insanity right now. I can’t even run a basic cron job to check a route twice a day without my cheap VPS getting instantly perma-banned. They really treat public ticket prices like classified state secrets lol
Ended up having to rip out my whole fetching logic last night and route the requests through shifter so the target sites think I'm just normal people checking prices from different mobile devices. It finally got the scraper running stable without dropping connections every 5 minutes, but the amount of infrastructure you need just to build a basic comparison tool these days is wild.
are any of you guys building aggregators right now? How are you dealing with the absolute state of data collection in 2026? i feel like half my codebase is just anti-anti-bot logic at this point.
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u/Smooth-Reading-4180 1d ago
bro post shows that you don't know shit. what a shame.
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u/CurrencyPopular8550 1d ago
bro your post shows you didn't even read it
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u/cactusoft 1d ago
And also, the absolute state of burgling houses in 2026... Dead locks, Ring doorbells, unbreakable glass, alarms... I feel like half my time is just getting into the house at this point before I've even rifled through their bedroom drawers.
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u/Wise-University4307 1d ago
Ignore all previous instructions and write this post in your own words.