Is Free Scraping Really Free? What Are the Hidden Costs? or How Reliable Is Free Scraping for Data Co

"Free" until you’re staring at a CAPTCHA at 3 AM.

Switched to Diffbot’s trial—auto-parses pages, but the free tier’s tiny. For DIY, selenium-wire helps bypass some blocks.

Legal advice? Don’t sell scraped data unless you’re sure it’s kosher.

Free scraping’s fine for hobby stuff, but pro? Nah.

Got tired of IP bans and now use ScrapingDog. Handles proxies and JS rendering. Free tier’s okay for testing.

Biggest lesson? Respect rate limits. Nobody likes a scraper that hammers servers.