Web Scraping has become an essential part of modern businesses, as access to data is crucial for growth and success in areas such as lead generation, marketing, research and competitor analysis.
Do Web Scraping Solutions need to be subscription based?
Today, if you search Google for web scraping tools, you'll find that most of the top results point to products that require a monthly subscription. The average starting plan for these services cost around $49 per month, and even then, they often come with usage limits - restricting the number of pages you can scrape, the number of concurrent tasks you can run, and more.
Do web scraping tools really need to be web based, offered only as software-as-a-service (SaaS)? Isn't there a better alternative to paying monthly bills just to scrape data.
Why is Cloud-Based Web Scraping So Expensive?
Web Scraping is a resource-intensive process. To scrape data from modern websites, a web scraper must load each page in a fully functional virtual browser instance. Running such browser instances requires significant amount of memory and processing power compared to regular computation tasks. Additionally, because cloud scrapers are more likely to be detected and blocked by target websites, they often rely on proxies or VPN to access pages anonymously and scrape data.
Switch to a local web scraping tool with a one-time payment
Not everything needs to be SaaS. While cloud-based scraping tools have their advantages, they are not the only option. A locally installable web scraping tool like WebHarvy can significantly reduce costs since there are no recurring subscription fees. You pay once and use the tool for life-time without any limitations. Because WebHarvy uses your computer's network and computing resources to perform scraping, we incur no usage-related costs and pass those savings directly to you. As a small software company, we take pride in providing personal and responsive customer support - often you'll hear directly from the developers themselves. Our lean structure allows us to release updates and fix issues quickly, ensuring that you always have a reliable and up-to-date scraping solution.
Benefits of choosing local web scraping solution with one-time payment
When you switch from a cloud-based tool with recurring monthly fees to a one-time purchase solution like WebHarvy, you enjoy the following benefits.
- 1. You own the data. The data which you scrape is fetched directly from the target website to your computer and parsed into a table by the web scraping software. The tool provider has no access to your data.
- 2. Unlimited usage. The software imposes no limitation on how many websites, pages or data you can scrape. The only limits are your computer's processing power, memory and available network bandwidth.
- 3. One-Time Payment. Pay once and use the software for life, with all valid updates included.
- 4. Scrape Complex Websites. Even though it runs locally on your computer, a web scraping tool like WebHarvy is extremely powerful under the hood while providing a user-friendly interface for easy data selection. With its capabilities to run custom JavaScript code on page, Regular Expressions for accurate text selection from page or HTML and adjustable browser options, WebHarvy can scrape even the most complex websites with ease.
- 5. Excellent Customer Support. Since we cater mostly to small and medium scale businesses and freelancers, our support is personal, detailed and fast compared to enterprise solutions.
- 6. You can run WebHarvy from Cloud. You can install and run WebHarvy on a cloud-based Windows instance provided by Amazon (AWS EC2 Windows) or Azure. This way, you get a cloud scraping solution without any recurring fees. You pay only for your cloud infrastructure.
- 7. Scrape data from local files. WebHarvy can scrape data from offline web pages (HTML pages) which are saved locally in your computer, without needing an internet connection.
Need Help or Have Questions?
In case you need help from switching from a SaaS web scraping tool to WebHarvy or if you have any questions, please feel free to reach out to our support.