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Web Scraping · Desktop App2025

Backlink Marketplace Price Aggregator

A secure desktop tool that checks a domain across five marketplaces and writes the cheapest price back to a Google Sheet.

Private repository
5
Marketplaces priced per domain
1-click
Windows installer (cloud-built)
Fernet
Encrypted credentials at rest

Tech stack

  • Python
  • Camoufox
  • Incogniton
  • Google Sheets API
  • PBKDF2 + Fernet
  • PyInstaller
  • GitHub Actions

Problem

Comparing backlink prices for many domains across several marketplaces is tedious: each site behaves differently, some require selecting a project or logging in, and each applies its own pricing quirks. Doing it manually for a large domain list is slow and error-prone — and the result has to land in the right column of a shared Google Sheet so the cheapest option is obvious.

Approach

I built a local web-UI desktop tool (Python backend) that, for each domain, checks five backlink marketplaces, parses availability and pricing with resilient heuristics, and writes the best price into the correct Google-Sheet column via a service account. It uses anti-detect browsers (Camoufox / Incogniton) with saved sessions — the first visit opens visibly so you log in or solve a captcha by hand, then the session is reused headlessly. All credentials are encrypted at rest with PBKDF2 + Fernet (the master password is never stored), and per-platform rules like fees, project selection and exact-match handling are editable in the UI.

Results

A shippable, secure internal product — a packaged .exe, live Google-Sheets sync, and per-platform selector overrides for resilience. The one-click installer is built automatically in the cloud via GitHub Actions, so a non-technical colleague can install and run it with no Python and no internet setup.

Notable engineering

  • For each domain, checks five backlink marketplaces, parses availability and pricing with resilient heuristics, and writes the cheapest price to the correct Google-Sheet column.
  • Two anti-detect browser backends (Camoufox / Incogniton) with saved sessions — log in once, reuse headlessly.
  • All credentials, keys and settings encrypted at rest with PBKDF2 + Fernet; the master password is never stored.
  • Per-platform selector overrides and special pricing rules (fees, project selection, exact-match) editable in the UI.
  • Ships as a one-click Windows installer built in the cloud via GitHub Actions CI.

Screenshots & diagrams

Real UI captures and figures — source is private and client brands are not shown.

Five marketplaces — per-column mapping, fee rules, and encrypted saved logins.
The Run tab — pick platforms, watch the browser, or run headless.
The pricing workflow — domain list → five marketplaces → cheapest → Sheet.
Credential security — PBKDF2 + Fernet, master password never stored.

Deep dive

Each marketplace is modelled as a pluggable platform module with its own selectors and special rules — one adds a fixed per-domain fee, another needs a project selected before searching, another only trusts an exact 100% domain match. Encoding these as editable, per-platform overrides (rather than hard-coded logic) is what keeps the tool resilient when a marketplace changes its layout.

Security was a hard requirement because the tool holds marketplace logins and a Google service-account key. Everything sensitive is encrypted at rest with PBKDF2-derived Fernet keys, unlocked per session by a master password that is never persisted. The whole thing is packaged with PyInstaller and released as a one-click Windows installer produced by a GitHub Actions pipeline — reproducible, and trivial for a non-technical user to install.