ScrapeField vs building it yourself
Writing your own scraper with Playwright or Puppeteer is free, flexible, and it works. What it costs is keeping it working. Here is when to build and when to buy.
| ScrapeField | Your own scraper | |
|---|---|---|
| To start | A GET request; no account needed to try | Free, open source |
| To run | Credits per call, and nothing else | Servers, browsers, and whatever it takes to stay unblocked |
| When the page changes | Our problem. The fields you get stay the same | Yours, usually found by a customer |
| Blocks | Handled; nothing for you to unblock | Yours to solve |
| Output | Documented JSON, the same every call | Whatever your parser returns |
| Sites and fields | 5 platforms, the documented fields | Any site, any field |
Checked 6 November 2026 against each vendor’s own pricing page. Rechecked quarterly — tell us if something here is out of date and we will fix it.
Questions
When is building it the right call?
When the site isn’t one of our five; when you need a field we don’t return; or when volume is low and someone on the team enjoys owning it. The cost that surprises people isn’t writing it, it is the second year of keeping it running.
Try it before you decide
Every endpoint has a playground that runs against the live API with no key and no account — real routing, real validation, real errors. If the response shape does not fit your code, you will know in about a minute.