# Kaabits, Kaabist, kaab.ist: where the name comes from

Kaabist · 10 October 2026

Kaabist comes from kaabits, Estonian for scraper. We bent it so the domain could be kaab.ist: .ist for Istanbul, where it is made, and -ist for someone who practises a craft. The logo is a spider's two eyes.

Every product name is a small bet. Ours started with a word we could not pronounce at first.

## Kaabits

*Kaabits* is Estonian for scraper: the tool you drag across a surface to take something off it. That is how this project began. We were getting data out of web pages that did not want to give it: pages behind logins, pages that change every few weeks, pages that ask for a code sent to someone's phone.

A scraper is a fine thing to be. But the longer we worked, the less the job looked like scraping. The hard part was never reading the page. It was everything around it: logging in again when a session expired, waiting for the account owner to type a code, not pressing *Submit* twice after a crash, and noticing when the site had moved a button.

## Kaabist

So we bent the word. *Kaabits* became *Kaabist*, and the name started to carry two more meanings.

- **.ist is Istanbul.** The domain is `kaab.ist`, and `.ist` is the city's own top-level domain. Kaabist is made in Istanbul, and the address says so.
- **-ist is the one who does it.** In English, *-ist* is the suffix for someone who practises a craft: a machinist, a typist, a cellist. A kaabist is someone whose craft is getting work done on the web, reliably.

Inside the code, the short form stayed: the command is `kaab`, the API lives at `api.kaab.ist`, and programs start with `"kaab": "1"`. Everywhere a person reads it, it is Kaabist.

## The eyes

The mark looks like two letters. It is a spider's two eyes.

Spiders crawl the web, which is what our programs do. And when a thread breaks, a spider goes to the break and mends it. That is the part we cared about most: when a website changes and a step stops working, Kaabist finds what changed, proposes the fix, and waits for you to approve it.

On this site the eyes blink, look around and walk to the broken thread. It is the same idea, drawn.

## What stays the same

The name changed; the craft did not. We still get data out of pages. We just also log in, wait, remember where we stopped, refuse to do anything important twice, and mend what breaks.