chop.ax
strip sites down to just their content
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I built web tool for accessing just the (usually text) content of sites. It handles news sites best, thanks to Mozilla's fantastic Readability library. It also supports sites that use client-side rendering, using Puppeteer. Stripped pages are cached in Redis.My main use-case for this tool is for extreme bandwidth-constrained networks, eg Meshtastic (with an internet gateway).
HN · launched Apr 9, 2026 · 6 upvotes (top 72%) · 0 views
Niche: web scraping tools and apis · 172 launches, 12 in the last 7 days ▲ +9% · Explore this niche →
Category and tags
- Horizontal
- Dev tools
- B2C
- Not AI
- Hobby / open-source project
Visit website ↗ Source listing ↗
More like this: all 172 launches in web scraping tools and apis →
Could you build this?
Yes It wraps existing open-source libraries (Mozilla Readability and Puppeteer) behind an API and web UI with a Redis caching layer.
Discussion
5 comments analyzed.
Concerns raised: Websites blocking requests with 403 errors, Performance issues on shared VPS hosting, Many listed sites don't work or return HTTP 403, Reddit doesn't work, Stripped pages harder to use with screen readers
Feature requests: Preserve CSS styling with unused selectors stripped, Remove non-functional inputs and buttons from output, Preserve images and SVGs on archived pages, AI audio reader integration for stripped content
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one : 174 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #166 of 175 (itself plus its competitors, highest first, normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 128 days after the earliest competitor.
- ReadScore · ph · 2026-10-22 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.42
- pagesift · github · 2026-10-20 · 57 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- HTMLPipe, and how to archive archive.is pages on archive.org manually · hn · 2026-03-30 · 7 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- PageHarbor · ph · 2026-09-30 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Offline PDF Desk · ph · 2026-09-22 · 2 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Page Scanner · ph · 2026-09-28 · 3 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Essentyx · ph · 2026-11-01 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- Website Sucker · ph · 2026-10-02 · 1 upvotes · similarity 0.38
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