How to Use a Web Scraping API: 5 Patterns + the 4 Trade-Offs vs Raw Scraping
How to use a web scraping API comes down to 5 patterns — marketplace proxies, custom-built wrappers, partner APIs, GraphQL endpoints, and headless-browser-as-a-service. Each has trade-offs vs raw scraping: cost, latency, captcha handling, and TOS compliance. Here's the pattern matrix and the 4 trade-offs.