Web Scraping APIs

Running your own scraper can quickly become overwhelming so there are a lot of scraping as a service paid web APIs out there.

These services help to avoid blocking and simplify many features like:

Abstracting page retrieval complexities from the web scraping process seems like a natural fit for small and big projects.

You should consider web scraping APIs if:

Your project has limited engineer resources
Learning all web scraping complexities can be very time-consuming
You're scraping targets that use web scraper blocking technologies
To scrape some well-protected targets expensive resources like proxies and constant maintenance is required.
You need flexible scaling

When it comes to evaluating a web scraping API look for these key features:

Anti-scraping protection (Cloudflare, PermiterX etc.) bypass.
While it's possible to write scrapers that get around these services keeping up with these services take a lot of engineering time.
Successful request based pricing
Since scrapers are being blocked often bandwidth-based pricing can add up quickly.
Javascript Rendering
Even when web-browser is unnecessary to scrape your target having the ability to fire up a cloud browser and do something comes in very handy.
Monitoring
It's easy to get lost when scaling scrapers so, having a proper monitoring dashboard makes it easier to develop, debug and keep an eye on the whole process.

Web Scraping API is a great shortcut into the web scraping world, however we can recreate most of its magic ourselves.