Web Data Extraction: BUILD vs. BUY

The Web is the largest source of data on earth. Ingenious organizations understand that the most important data about their competitors, customers and market exists on the web. This data though is formatted for human presentation, making it not readily usable by machines. That’s where web scraping comes to the rescue.

When your business faces a need for web data, your first intuition might be to hire a developer, or ask an existing one on your team, to write some web scrapers.

Why Is Scraping The Web Harder Than Most People Think?

Web scraping today is harder than what most people think. Here’s why:

• Technologies that power the web have become much more complex and sophisticated.
• Modern websites use dynamic pages that hide the content behind JavaScript which can only be executed in a web browser.
• Employing IP blocking, CAPTCHA challenges and other bot detection technologies, to discourage scraping, has become the norm.
• Working around and keeping up with these challenges has the potential to soon turn into a rabbit hole, proving the scraping project to be much more expensive and time-consuming than what was originally anticipated.

What Are Your Options?

When it comes to web data extraction technology, many companies find themselves facing a familiar question: should we build our own solution or buy an existing one? The answer is not a one-size-fits-all, as it depends on various factors such as company needs, policies, and available resources. Each approach has its merits, and a careful evaluation is necessary.

On-premise Solution

It is a custom-built approach in which a business develops its own web scraping tools to satisfy certain requirements, utilizing its resources and skills for development and maintenance.

When Is This Choice The Best Fit?

Building a custom solution is a viable option when:

• The company has unique and specific requirements that cannot be adequately addressed by off-the-shelf products or services.
• There are stringent security requirements and specialized operational workflows that demand a tailored solution.
• The company possesses the financial resources, technical expertise, and operational experience to undertake enterprise-level software development.
• The company has a proven track record of successfully delivering custom software projects on time and within budget.

When Does This Approach Fall Short?

People usually underestimate the cost of in-house web scraping operations. The challenges will be 10 times more pronounced if your scrapers need to operate at scale, due to the large size or number of websites or the high frequency with which the scraped data needs to be refreshed. Now you’re facing a distributed systems problem because your workload is, or will soon become, bigger than what a script running on a single computer can handle.

On top of it, you will need a way to manage cloud resources, a deployment system to push code to the cloud, a monitoring mechanism to ensure smooth operation, QA process to ensure data quality etc. Even if you made a huge one-off spend to solve those challenges, you still need development resources for continuous ongoing maintenance. This is because things are going to break often due to the dynamic nature of the web. Websites’ page layouts, navigation patterns and data formats will change more often that you might have imagined. Website administrators will find new ways to block your scrapers. All those issues will pile on to your operational costs, making in-house scraping operations an expensive proposition.

Self-Service SaaS Tools

The next alternative for web data acquisition might be to buy one of the SaaS style platforms which generally allow non-technical users to set-up cloud-hosted scraping jobs in a self-service manner. It is suitable for small to medium-sized businesses on a budget.

When Is This Choice The Best Fit?

It is a viable solution when:

• Businesses need rapid deployment and ease of use because they typically have user-friendly interfaces and call for little technical know-how, allowing non-technical users to quickly implement data extraction procedures without time-consuming setup or configuration.
• Cost-effectiveness is important because they offer flexible pricing plans and let businesses pay only for the data extraction services they actually need. This makes them especially appealing for small to medium-sized businesses or those on a tight budget.
• Businesses have specific or niche data extraction requirements, offering customization options that allow users to define data sources, select relevant fields, and apply filters or transformations, thereby accommodating unique data needs that may not be met by off-the-shelf solutions or fully-managed services.
• Businesses seek freedom to define parameters, schedule tasks, and have direct access to the extracted data. This is especially useful for real-time or on-demand extraction and data ownership.

When Does This Approach Fall Short?

However, while they market themselves as a no-code solution for self-service web scraping, they mostly fall short of this claim. Their pricing is generally based on a subscription model, which carries limits on how many pages you can scrape and cloud credits for using the cloud resources. They might be a decent choice for one-off small workloads involving websites with easy to medium complexity, they nowhere come close to a hassle-free solution. Also, due to the obscure pricing model with variable cloud credits for unlocking different features make it very hard to predict the project cost.

Fully-managed Solutions

These are ready-made services that take care of a large proportion of a business's data extraction requirements, eliminating the need for internal development and offering professional support and scalability.

When Is This Choice The Best Fit?

Buying a ready-made solution is a suitable choice under the following circumstances:

• The web data extraction solution of interest covers a significant majority (around 90%) of the company's specific extraction needs.
• The organization's main focus is on core competencies, and dedicating internal technology resources to developing a data extraction solution would be counterproductive.
• Hiring personnel or accessing experienced technology experts specialized in web data extraction is not feasible or not aligned with the company's interests.
• Leveraging the expertise of a dedicated web data extraction service provider would complement the existing technical resources and offer valuable support.

When Does This Approach Fall Short?

Fully-managed solutions have certain considerations too. They may involve higher upfront expenses. However, businesses must take into account the long-term savings in infrastructure, maintenance, and support costs, which often exceed the expenses associated with developing and maintaining an in-house solution. Dependence on a third-party source is an additional issue to take into account. Adopting a fully-managed solution entails relying on the supplier for web data extraction while also giving access to knowledge and assistance. Therefore, in order to reduce the risks of service interruptions, price increases, or policy revisions, businesses need to carefully choose reliable providers. Additionally, fully-managed solutions could have less customization choices, which might be a problem for companies with specialized or unusual data extraction needs.

How Can CrawlNow Help?

CrawlNow is your one-stop shop for transforming websites into actionable data because:

• The time it takes to access mission-critical data can be greatly decreased. We can build up scraping procedures fast and effectively thanks to our robust platform, which eliminates the need for substantial custom code.
• It uses cutting-edge technologies and has extensive knowledge of web data extraction, resulting in accurate and high-quality findings that offer insightful information.
• Up to 75% cheaper than on-premise solutions, simply as a result of economies of scale.
• We can tailor the extraction process to deliver the specific data you desire, from choosing pertinent data sources to defining fields and applying custom filters.
• Our infrastructure and capabilities can easily handle larger data volumes as your data extraction demands rise, maintaining efficiency and providing trustworthy findings even as your organization grows.
• We reduce any risks associated with data extraction through compliance with legal and ethical requirements which includes abiding by website terms of service, observing rate restrictions, and maintaining data privacy and security.