3 posts tagged with "web scraping"

Something's breaking in web scraping.

Success rates are slipping. Costs are spiralling. Teams are struggling to keep up.

The proxies are cheaper. The infrastructure is more sophisticated.

But the math no longer works.

Proxies that once cost $30 per GB now go for $1.

Yet the cost of a successful scrape, one clean, validated payload, has doubled or tripled or 10X.

Web scraping hasn't gotten harder because of access.

It's gotten harder because of economics.

Retries, JS rendering, and anti-bot bypasses now consume more budget than bandwidth.

Every website is still technically scrapable, but fewer make financial sense to scrape at scale.

The barrier isn't access anymore. It's affordability.

This is Scraping Shock, the moment cheap access collides with expensive success.

In this article, we will dive deep into the most important trend affecting web scraping today:

How web scraping got harder, even as proxies got cheaper…

Proxies have never been cheaper. Scraping has never been more expensive.

That's the Proxy Paradox, a quiet contradiction reshaping the economics of web scraping.

Over the past few years, the cost of proxies has fallen dramatically. Residential bandwidth that once cost $30 per GB can now be found for $1. Datacenter proxies are cheaper than coffee.

On paper, this should have ushered in a golden age for web scraping; faster, cheaper, easier access to public data.

But that's not what's happening.

At ScrapeOps, we see billions of requests every month across thousands of domains. And the trend is undeniable…

While proxies keep getting cheaper, the cost of successful scraping is exploding.

In today's scraping market, proxies have become a commodity.

But scraping success is now at a premium.

This is the paradox at the heart of modern web scraping.

And it's redefining how companies measure, optimize, and compete in the data economy.

In this article, we will walk through:

With 2021 having come to an end, now is the time to look back at the big events & trends in the world of web scraping, and try to project what will 2022 look like for web scraping.