Timing is perfect because to do that, you need a robust headless browser and a smart way to locally identify the elements on the page if you don't want to maintain your scripts. That's why we use Puppeteer and TensorflowJS which didn't exists 2-3 years ago.
But sure, there are website owners who don't want an API for their website. Our plan is not to fight against them but to start with owner that are already convinced that they could benefits from automating the usage of their website. The banking sector understood that, and that's why Yodlee and Plaid are so successful today.
And if you step back, there are tons of websites that don't have the ressources to create an API (30% of the websites have been created using Wordpress) and don't know the value they could generate from it.
So yes, we'll have to overcome a lot of challenges to build this technology and make it accessible to everyone but we are convinced that the Internet will be used more and more programmatically in the future and we are just paving the way for it ;)
For example, Google temporarily bans your IP when you hit things like Google Play urls multiple times in a few minutes. This is clearly an attempt to block anyone but a human to extract information from the Play store.
Also might be concerned about inaccuracies from variable pricing models for example. There’s a few reasons why you may not want it accessible - hence one of the reasons why CORS is even a thing.
I feel like this would have the same sort of friction that RSS had.
Which is to say, it could certainly still work.
What's the plan here to really become differentiated? Why is now the right time for this concept and not before when others tried it? Also, how do you plan to address the concerns of companies that don't want their data to be accessed programmatically? That seems like a big challenge to overcome in order to become commercially succesful.