Proxy vs API
to scrape any website.

A few factors move proxy prices. Shared proxies, used by many people at once, are cheaper than dedicated ones, with lower but often acceptable quality depending on your target. Test a few solutions and find the cost-to-quality ratio that works for your product.

Residential proxies cost more because real people share the IP, so your scraper looks less like a bot, and some sites block datacenter IPs outright. You trade price for a lower footprint.

Many sites, especially product sites, expose API access to their data, sometimes free. If a public API covers your use case it can save proxy costs, so check your target before you build. Some developer APIs are expensive, and teams often fall back to scraping with proxies to keep costs down.

Websites usually offer data APIs in JSON, CSV or XML. That structured data is not the same as what your scraper gets from a public HTML page. A few reasons:

• APIs give generic structured data that the company allows others to use.
• Scraping the HTML gives you what a real user of the site actually sees.
• Scraper intelligence and learning vary from one scraper to another.
• An API is guaranteed to return data, while scraping may not if proxies are blocked.

Ever wonder why proxy requests to a US-only site return permission errors? The location of your proxy matters. A few reasons:

• A site may be available in the United States only, so requests from other continents will not work.
• Product sites tailor descriptions, prices and delivery by location.
• Requesting a site from an uncommon location often returns an error page, so you need to find the location that scrapes your target best.

At Crawlbase we go the extra mile to access data from any website and give you a simple GET request to our API. One endpoint, no extra steps.

The main benefits of our API vs website APIs vs shared or private proxies:

• A public API that works for projects of any volume.
• Features like screenshots, stored results and generic website scraping.
• Receive raw HTML exactly as it appears on the original site.
• A wrapper around any website, so your proxy list is no longer needed.
• CAPTCHA pages and banned IPs become a thing of the past.
• Chrome and headless browsers available on demand.
• Room to grow faster with our engineers backing you up.