Tools: I Built 20+ Web Scrapers and Published Them for Free — Here's What I Learned

The Stack ## What I Built ## Hard Lessons Learned ## 1. CheerioCrawler vs PlaywrightCrawler ## 2. Anti-Bot is No Joke ## 3. Wrong Code in Production ## 4. Intercept APIs, Don't Scrape DOM ## Pricing & Business Model ## Try Them Out I recently built over 20 web scrapers and published them all on the Apify Store. Here's what I learned about building scrapers at scale, dealing with anti-bot systems, and making data extraction tools that actually work. All output clean, structured JSON with the fields you'd expect — prices, ratings, URLs, dates, etc. My biggest mistake was defaulting to CheerioCrawler (fast HTTP + HTML parsing). Modern websites are increasingly JS-rendered — Amazon, Walmart, Booking.com, Zillow all require a real browser. Rule of thumb: If the site shows a loading spinner before content appears, you need Playwright. Some sites were practically impossible: The sites that worked best were ones with server-rendered HTML or public APIs (Reddit's old.reddit.com JSON endpoints, Apple's iTunes API). During a rush to deploy, I accidentally pushed Zillow scraper code to the Walmart actor and Walmart code to the Indeed actor. Lesson: always verify what's actually running in production, not just what's in your local files. The Pinterest fix was a breakthrough moment. Instead of trying to parse React's virtual DOM, I intercepted Pinterest's internal API calls using page.on('response'). The API returns clean JSON — way more reliable than CSS selectors. All scrapers use pay-per-result pricing: $1.50 per 1,000 results. Apify handles hosting, scaling, billing, and proxy infrastructure. As a developer, you get ~80% of revenue minus compute costs. All scrapers are free to try (Apify gives new users free credits): 👉 Browse all scrapers on Apify Store What's your experience with web scraping at scale? Any tips for dealing with anti-bot systems? Let me know in the comments. Templates let you quickly answer FAQs or store snippets for re-use. Are you sure you want to hide this comment? It will become hidden in your post, but will still be visible via the comment's permalink. Hide child comments as well For further actions, you may consider blocking this person and/or reporting abuse COMMAND_BLOCK: page.on('response', async (response) => { if (response.url().includes('/resource/')) { const data = await response.json(); // Clean, structured data — no DOM parsing needed } }); Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode COMMAND_BLOCK: page.on('response', async (response) => { if (response.url().includes('/resource/')) { const data = await response.json(); // Clean, structured data — no DOM parsing needed } }); COMMAND_BLOCK: page.on('response', async (response) => { if (response.url().includes('/resource/')) { const data = await response.json(); // Clean, structured data — no DOM parsing needed } }); - Runtime: Node.js with ES modules - Framework: Crawlee — handles retries, proxy rotation, rate limiting - Browsers: Playwright for JS-heavy sites, Cheerio for static HTML - Proxies: Residential proxies via Apify proxy pool - Platform: Apify for hosting, scaling, and monetization - Instagram — login wall blocks all unauthenticated access - Twitter/X — aggressive bot detection even with residential proxies - Glassdoor — 403 blocks on every approach - Google Shopping — CAPTCHA walls after 2-3 requests - Amazon Scraper - Reddit Scraper - Zillow Scraper - Google SERP Scraper