Cost Components

Generally speaking, data scraping costs consist of the following components:

• Development costs: Payment to engineers who write and maintain scraping programs.
• Server costs: Renting computer servers to ensure programs run 24/7.
• Proxy IP costs: Using other network addresses to access restricted websites (not mandatory).
• CAPTCHA solving costs: Paid solutions for website CAPTCHA security checks (not mandatory).
• Account costs: Purchasing multiple accounts to access websites requiring login (not mandatory).

1. Development Costs

Data scraping requires professional crawler engineers to develop programs. This cost includes:

• Initial communication: Understanding your requirements and designing scraping solutions.
• Program development and testing: Writing code and ensuring programs run normally.
• Post-launch support: Fixing issues or adjusting programs based on website changes.

2. Server Costs

After scraping programs are developed, they need to be deployed on servers to run, ensuring 24-hour uninterrupted data collection. Although personal computers can also run programs, they are prone to interruption due to power outages, network disconnections, or crashes, making them unsuitable for long-term use.

Why do we need servers?

• Stability: Servers can run continuously, avoiding interruptions.
• Data delivery: Some projects require servers to provide download services or backend management systems (for example, providing file downloads after daily data scraping, see Data Delivery for details).

Well-known server providers:

• Premium options: Amazon AWS, Microsoft Azure, Google GCP, higher costs.
• Economic options: Vultr, DigitalOcean, monthly rent about 140-280 CNY (20-40 USD).
• Large-scale scraping may require multiple servers, but hourly billing allows flexible cost control.

3. Proxy IP Costs

Proxy IPs (accessing websites through other network addresses to hide real IPs) are not required for all projects, but are essential in the following situations:

• Access restrictions: Some websites (such as Google, YouTube) restrict access from mainland China IPs, requiring foreign proxy IPs.
• Frequency limits: Some websites limit the number of visits from the same IP (such as no more than 20 visits to Google per minute). Automated programs collect data quickly and easily trigger bans, requiring multiple proxy IPs for rotation.

Example: To scrape YouTube video data, mainland China IPs cannot access it, so foreign proxy IPs are needed to bypass restrictions.

Cost reference:

4. CAPTCHA Costs

CAPTCHAs are security measures used by websites to prevent automated scraping. As website anti-scraping technology upgrades, CAPTCHAs are becoming increasingly common. The images below show common Google CAPTCHA and Cloudflare CAPTCHA.

Google reCAPTCHA

Google reCAPTCHA

Cloudflare Turnstile

Why do we need CAPTCHA solving?

• IP issues: Home broadband IPs are usually used by fewer people, belonging to "high-quality IPs" that are less likely to trigger CAPTCHAs. Server IPs are "public IPs" shared by many people, easily suspected by websites as crawlers, triggering CAPTCHAs.
• High-frequency access: Even high-quality IPs, if accessed frequently in a short time (such as using programs to quickly access Google dozens of times), will trigger CAPTCHAs.

Solution: The most convenient method is to purchase CAPTCHA solving services (automatically bypassing CAPTCHAs through paid tools).

5. Account Costs

Some websites require login to obtain complete data (such as X, Facebook, Instagram), which may require multiple accounts to accelerate scraping.

Why do we need multiple accounts?

• Data limits: For example, one X account can only scrape 1000 pieces of data per day, 1 million pieces of data would take 1000 days. Using 100 accounts only takes 10 days.
• Real case: The team once scraped Thailand Grab food delivery data, one phone number could only scrape less than 100 pieces of data per day, ultimately delivering 340,000 pieces of data, requiring many phone numbers, and account costs were also a major expense.

Cost reference: