Your business doesn’t care about scraping - it cares about data

I'm a web scraping professional. For years, I was a solo developer, learning and implementing web scraping in a corporate environment and as a freelancer at the same time. The thing I prided myself on the most was my ability to build all my scrapers myself.

Many other developers among you will likely think the same way. Your value is tied to your ability to actually extract the information from the site and hand it up the chain.

I built all the spiders for myself. I managed my own infrastructure. I even built a rudimentary but workable proxy system that meant I could test and retry requests. I even had a go at browser infrastructure (never again).

My ego liked that I had full control. Everything I used, apart from a few minor external services, was built by me. For a decade, building our own scrapers was a competitive advantage. We had full control, we got the data we needed, and it was our “secret weapon.”

But things have changed.

Data engineers say “web scraping is easy” and, at one point, that was true.

But, as time progressed, things started to change. Everything has become much harder. The price of entry is growing, and it's become much more difficult to operate effectively on your own.

The challenges have escalated on multiple fronts:

• AI-driven anti-bot systems.

• Advanced browser/TLS fingerprinting.

• Escalating CAPTCHA hell.

• Rising infrastructure and maintenance costs.

This last point was the main one for me. Having built all my own services, just keeping those going was becoming quite difficult.

So, how do we succeed?

I offloaded it to a web scraping API. I stopped trying to do it all.

It took me a little bit of time to swallow my own pride and accept that this was okay. I don't have to be the person that does everything. I don't have to manage it all myself. My value is not dictated by how good my code is.

Now is the time for you, like me, to migrate to a web scraping API, for everything.

IP bans and proxies are a very challenging thing that has to be managed. It's not as simple as just getting a couple of IPs and going for it; it doesn't work like that anymore. With fingerprinting, if your fingerprint gets flagged and matched, you can have as many IPs as you like and you're still not going to get anywhere.

Then there’s CAPTCHA management, which I really didn't like, and browser management, which I hated even more. Manual scraping has a lot of moving parts.

All of these things are manageable at a small scale. But I found, as my skills developed, as the business I was working for wanted more and more data from more and more sites. As I started to take on my own clients, as I scaled up, it became even more difficult and even more impossible. There’s a strong chance you are feeling the same way.

I reached breaking point. I was firefighting more than I was actually building anything. Skeptical, I looked to web scraping APIs as a way to reclaim my time.

Before, I would spend about 70% of my allotted time on maintenance. I was maintaining what I had already built, rather than making new things and extracting new data to help the business and my clients. Transitioning off my hand-rolled code meant fewer 3 a.m. calls to fix broken scrapers. 

After I moved over to an API, I roughly estimated that I spend about 10% of my time on maintenance. Now, if something stops working, the most I have to do is raise a support ticket and chase it, which is a lot easier than trying to figure out why your browser stack stopped working.

I wanted to shift the focus from being a cost-center (maintenance) to a value-adder (innovation).

The third realization I had to go through (and this was possibly the hardest one to understand) was that, at the end of the day, the people I was delivering data to did not care how good my scraping skills were. They didn't care how good my spiders were, or how amazing my browser infrastructure was.

What they cared about was getting data that they needed reliably, consistently, and on time.

This became my main focus. I wanted to be able to take on more clients, and I wanted the business I was working for to prosper. For that, we needed data.

So I shifted my focus to what matters: just getting data. I needed to stop getting bogged down and start analyzing data, building data products, and serving my clients.

I switched to using a web scraping API for everything.

Now, with a web scraping API, many people see trade-offs - they use it for some data tasks and not other things.

The cost equation

Many scrapers believe web scraping APIs are costlier than hands-on development. For me, this wasn't a massive issue.

We have to factor in the time we spend fixing things we've already written and maintaining the services we've built. When you compare that to a simple cost-per-request basis, what I found in the end was that, for me, it wasn't that different.

The time I saved not fixing things was saved against the overall cost. It also meant I found it much easier to quote for projects, because I knew pretty much ahead of time what a certain number of requests would cost.

Loss of control

I found the prospect of giving up my cherished control very difficult, and I think a lot of developers will feel the same way.

In fact, it wasn't a total loss of control. I was still writing my own code. I was still writing my own spiders. I was still in control of how and when I ran them. Nothing was going into a mysterious black box; it was all running through my code. I had error messages I could debug and I could understand what was actually happening.

Edge cases

What about those incredibly unique, finicky targets that require a special touch? An API might fail on them; this is true - no API is perfect.

But the solution isn’t to stick with a 100% DIY model for everything. The smart approach is a hybrid model

For me, this ended up being more like a 95/5 split. I migrated 95% of my targets to the API, reaping massive efficiency gains. For the remaining 5% of truly unique edge cases, I could now afford to dedicate focused, high-quality development time to building a custom solution, without being distracted by the maintenance of the other 95%.

From my initial skeptical stance, I came to a simple conclusion.

If I wanted to get more clients and provide a better service, migrating to a web scraping API was the absolute total solution for me; it was just an absolute no-brainer.

Migrating to a web scraping API is not an unskilled developer’s way out; it’s the smart way savvy engineers move the needle for their business.