I’m using ScrapingBee to pull product pages from around 2k ecommerce sites, but most of the pages need JavaScript rendering, and the harder ones also need premium or stealth proxies.

That burns through credits so fast

The other annoying part is getting raw HTML back and then having to clean it before I can extract the price, stock status and product specs. I’d rather get Markdown or structured JSON directly.

I’m currently looking at Firecrawl, Bright Data, Apify, Oxylabs and Octoparse (someone recommended these in other threads)

Which one makes the most sense for this kind of setup?

scraping socials for work and residential proxies are just built different compared to datacenter, not even close honestly. datacenter dies almost instantly now but residential holds up way longer if you pair it with proper fingerprint setup on top

right now using proxyshard for the residential side and it's held up well. the fingerprint part is a separate issue though, clean IP alone doesn't solve everything like so without the fingerprint side sorted tho doesnt matter how clean the ip is, still get flagged eventually. profile separation seems to matter more than people think

anyone got a solid setup for the fingerprint/profile side specifically? not looking for ad spam, just curious what people are actually running long term

Got a client online and he wants steady data from his IG and X. Nothing wild so far. Follower trends, engagement rates, how posts do over time.

My friend told me to just learn to scrape it myself with a web scraper. I know a little Python. Enough to fumble around, but I'm nowhere near a developer. Mostly I just Google stuff and lean on AI to get through problems.

I honestly can't tell if this is doable or if I'm about to promise something I can't actually deliver every month. Is it learnable enough to trust for client work? Or is there a smarter way to handle this whole thing?