I Built a GDPR Compliance Scanner Using the Claude API - Here's How It Works

I Built a GDPR Compliance Scanner Using the Claude API - Here's How It Works A few months ago I noticed something that kept bugging me. I was building and handing off websites for clients and every single time, GDPR compliance was either an afterthought or a panic right before launch. Privacy policies copied from templates, cookie banners slapped on at the last minute, no one really sure if the contact form was actually compliant. The bigger problem: there was no quick, affordable way to check . Enterprise compliance tools cost hundreds per month. Legal consultants cost more. Most small businesses just crossed their fingers. So I built ClearlyCompliant - an automated GDPR compliance scanner that analyses a website and delivers a detailed PDF report for a one-off fee. No subscription, no jargon, just a clear picture of where a site stands. Here's how it actually works under the hood. The Stack Django (Python) - backend and web app BeautifulSoup + requests - crawling and HTML parsing Python threading - async scanning without the overhead of Celery/Redis Anthropic Claude API (Haiku) - AI-powered policy analysis ReportLab - PDF report generation Stripe - payments IONOS SMTP - email delivery Gunicorn + Nginx on an IONOS VPS The Scanning Pipeline When a user submits a domain and completes payment, the scan kicks off immediately. Rather than making them wait on a loading screen, the scan runs asynchronously in a background thread and the report gets emailed when it's done. I deliberately avoided Celery and Redis here. For the scale I needed, Python's built-in threading module was more than sufficient and kept the infrastructure simple. One less thing to maintain, one less thing to break. import threading def run_scan_async ( domain , order_id , customer_email ): thread = threading . Thread ( target = run_full_scan , args = ( domain , order_id , customer_email ) ) thread . daemon = True thread . start () The scan itself runs 23 individual GDPR checks across several categori