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Dev.to
6/28/2026
I Ship a New Data Scraper Every Few Days. Here Is What I Have Learned

I Ship a New Data Scraper Every Few Days. Here Is What I Have Learned

Short summary

After shipping 85+ production data scrapers deployed on Apify, this builder shares lessons on competing with bloated dashboard subscriptions. Core insights: pay-per-use billing fundamentally changes product strategy; anti-bot detection (proxies, fingerprinting) is the constant technical fight; chaining scraper outputs creates value generic tools cannot. Positioning and shipping speed matter far more than feature perfection.

  • •Built 85+ production scrapers as a pay-per-use service to compete with expensive dashboard subscriptions
  • •Anti-bot detection (residential proxies, browser fingerprinting) and keyless public APIs (SEC EDGAR, openFDA, npm, PyPI) were the hardest technical wins
  • •Strategic lessons: positioning beats features, power users beat total users, chaining outputs beats single-purpose tools

Generated with AI, which can make mistakes.

#product-launch#market-trend#industry-adoption
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