Austin Daycare Finder

The tool uses an Apify Google Maps scraper, orchestrated through Claude Code.

You give it an address or two (like home and work) and it scrapes every daycare in range.

For each daycare the scraper identifies, it visits the website and extracts what's unique about the place, the pricing if it's published, opening hours, and any available tour info.

The first scrape came back with flawed results.

Digging into the data, I realized Google was capping results and biasing toward big high-review centers. I never gave that as a requirement in the JSON, but it's a good reminder. AI doesn't always think about details the same way you do.

A good lesson for any scrape:

1. Start small.
2. Run a local geo manually first.
3. Look at every result personally before you scale.

Otherwise you risk burning credits ($) on bigger statewide or nationwide scrapes using bad logic, and end up with imperfect data anyway.