Part 2 of 2: Build vs. Buy in 2025
Let’s not overcomplicate this. We’re not talking about scraping Google or launching a full-blown marketplace monitoring operation. This is basic. One site. A few thousand pages. No logins. No personalization. Just a straightforward scrape.
And even that is falling apart faster than most teams can keep up with.
DIY Always Starts Easy
It starts with a script. Add some proxies. Maybe a CAPTCHA solver. Schedule it to run at night.
Feels like it’s working—until:
- The site layout changes and your selectors stop working
- CAPTCHAs trigger every fifth request
- Your proxies get flagged and traffic slows to a crawl
- The script still runs, but it’s quietly collecting junk
No alerts. No stack trace. Just broken data that looks fine—until someone actually reads it.
What It Really Takes to Keep a Scraper Alive
Even at small scale—one or two ecommerce sites, a few thousand pages a day—here’s what it actually takes to keep that setup running:
| Task | DIY Cost |
|---|---|
| Proxy/IP rotation | $1,000–$2,500/month |
| CAPTCHA solving | $250–$750/month |
| Engineering time | 5–10 hours/week |
| Monitoring & alerts | Often skipped |
That adds up to $75K–$100K per year. And that’s just to stay functional. No load balancing. No redundancy. Just holding things together with duct tape and hope.
Quiet Failures Are the Most Dangerous
Most scrapers don’t fail loudly. They fail silently.
We’ve seen teams scrape a product page for weeks before realizing a key field was returning an empty string. The job ran. The logs were clean. The data was useless.
In one case, a pricing team missed a competitor’s discount campaign for nearly two weeks. Their scraper had been flagged and was only returning cached content. The reports looked fine. Until they weren’t.
The Real Cost Isn’t Tools—It’s Time
Sure, proxies and CAPTCHA solvers cost money. But the real drain is your team’s time.
Every hour spent chasing 403s and tweaking selectors is time not spent on product, customers, or shipping real features. And usually, scraping isn’t anyone’s actual job. It’s just something someone agreed to “get working.”
Now you’re maintaining infrastructure you never meant to build.
Specialization Wins in 2025
In 2025, scraping isn’t just a technical task. It’s an operational discipline.
And that changes the conversation. The question is no longer “what will it cost to build?” It’s “what else will we not be doing because we’re choosing to build this?”
Hardly anyone builds their own payment stack or email system anymore. Scraping is heading in the same direction. Not because it’s impossible, but because it no longer makes sense to compete with specialists when your edge lies somewhere else.
A good scraping partner doesn’t just write code. They’ve already built the browser behavior, detection evasion, fallback logic, and monitoring you’ll wish you had when your script quietly breaks on a holiday weekend.
You’re not outsourcing scraping because it’s hard. You’re outsourcing it because your team has more important problems to solve.
Final Word: Can You Carry It?
If you’re just testing the waters or pulling a few pages, go for it. No judgment.
But if scraped data is powering decisions, reports, or products, then it’s not a script anymore. It’s a system.
And systems need owners. They need monitoring. They need attention.
So the real question isn’t “Can we build this?”
It’s “Do we want to carry it?”
If the answer’s yes, build it and build it right.
If not, find a partner who treats it like the critical infrastructure it is.
