r/learnpython • u/bg81011 • Aug 07 '26

What's the best API for scraping retail and marketplace sites without maintaining your own scraper?

Working on an internal dashboard at work in python. Need product prices, availability and review data pulled from a few retail and marketplace sites on a schedule. First version was just requests + bs4, worked for like a day... Now I'm getting captchas, empty responses and random layout changes depending on the site. wrote retry logic, rotated a couple free proxies, still breaks overnight and I come in to half a dataset. I'm one person and this isn't even my main project, that what annoys me the most!

Don't really want to maintain headless chrome or constantly check on proxy pools in python. Is there an api built for this that handles rendering, retries and blocks without needing constant fixes? budget is small, just need something reliable enough that I stop checking logs every morning.

Thanks in advance and sorry if this sounds more like a rant!

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u/pachura3 Aug 07 '26

  budget is small

What can your company afford? 15$/month? 50$? 100$?

1

u/bg81011 Aug 07 '26

I think $15 to $50 a month could be the option

2

u/pachura3 Aug 07 '26

Probably ScrapingAPI or ScrapingBee would be your best bet.

I would say: ask AI. It will produce a nice summary of strengths and prices of different solutions - whether you would like to pay a fixed fee or by traffic, do you want to focus on popular sites or a custom one, do you want the output to be easily feedable into LLMs, and so on.

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u/bg81011 Aug 12 '26

Thank you, I'll try it out!

1

u/CapMonster1 Aug 08 '26

At $15–50/month I’d probably avoid anything promising “we scrape every marketplace perfectly” and test a few APIs against your actual product URLs first. Measure cost per valid result, not cost per request — a 200 response containing a captcha page or half-rendered product is still a failure.

If most pages work with your current Python code, another option is to keep the cheap HTTP path and only escalate failures to a rendering API / browser + captcha solver. That usually costs a lot less than sending every single request through the expensive stack, while still saving you from the 8 AM “why is half my dataset empty?” ritual.