About us

WrapAPI was created by Peter Xu with help from Harry Yu, graduates from Yale University with CS degrees who are now living and working in San Francisco. We built WrapAPI after living without it for many years and dozens of projects. We've noticed that many of our projects involve:

• Taking data from many sources and combining it in new insightful ways. For example, CourseTable (featured in the New York Times) involves taking data from Yale's course information website, presenting it in a novel way, and combining it with Amazon data for textbook prices.
• Scraping data over time. For example, we had collected Stubhub data over many months to do some interesting analyses. For example, we identified that for General Admissions concerts, it is always a good idea to wait until the last minute to buy tickets.
• Putting a new, better user interface on top of an existing app.. During his time as a consultant McKinsey, Peter built a tool to let consultants enter their expenses into Excel and have that automatically uploaded to an Infor expense management system.

However, for each of these projects, we've had to write scrapers and map out the requests and hidden APIs of each website. This involved painstakingly examining captured requests, hand-authoring Python, Javascript, and PHP functions to make the requests, and testing them by running the scripts and copying the outputs to HTML files to view in browsers.

WrapAPI is our distillation of our best practices and workflow for mapping out an API endpoint in existing websites. We hope that the easy-to-use user interface and the APIs shared by other users can greatly reduce the time needed to develop one of the applications we had in the past.