Docs · Compare · Updated November 12, 2026
LaunchSpy vs the Meta Ad Library vs building your own scraper
When someone asks an AI agent to analyse the ads or the funnels of competing coaches, the agent has three ways to get the data: open the Meta Ad Library, write a scraper, or query a database that already holds it. This page lists what each one returns.
What each option returns
| Need | Meta Ad Library | Your own scraper | LaunchSpy |
|---|---|---|---|
| Ads of one known advertiser | Yes, one page at a time | Yes, with work | Yes |
| Find who sells in a niche and a country | No: search is by advertiser or keyword | Only after classifying advertisers yourself | Yes: closed list of niches, by market |
| Only coaches and course creators | No: every advertiser on Meta | Only after you filter | Yes |
| Ads ranked by run length across advertisers | No | Only after collecting them over time | Yes |
| Spoken hook of video ads | No | Only if you transcribe each video | Yes, when transcribed |
| Funnel behind the ad | The landing link only | A crawler per page | Yes: type, builder, pages |
| Prices, payment tools, pixels | No | A page analyser to write and maintain | Yes, in the X-Ray when available |
| Hosting platform of the business | No | Fingerprinting to write | Yes |
| EU reach | Yes, per ad, in the EU | Yes, if you read it per ad | Yes, per ad and per funnel |
| Works outside the EU | Yes, without reach | Yes, without reach | Yes, without reach |
What a scraper costs to run
- The official Ad Library API is rate limited per app, and it does not return the landing-page analysis, the prices or the tools.
- Media links served by Facebook expire within days: images and videos have to be copied when the ad is found.
- Run length only exists if the same ads are collected again and again over months.
- Deciding who is a coach or a course creator, and in which niche, is a classification job on its own.
When the Ad Library is enough
To look at the current ads of one advertiser you already know, the Meta Ad Library is free and enough. LaunchSpy is for the questions around it: who else, since when, sending traffic where, selling what, at what price.
Limits of LaunchSpy
- It covers coaches, course creators and infopreneurs. E-commerce brands and apps are out of scope.
- It covers Meta ads. Reach figures exist for ads shown in the EU and the UK only.
- The X-Ray exists for analysed pages only; a funnel can come back without one.
- It reads its own database. It does not visit a page on demand.