Build vs Buy: What 40+ Teams Learned Maintaining Their Own Scraper
After watching 40+ teams evaluate build vs buy for competitor and catalog monitoring, the pattern is consistent: a one-off script is fine for one site, and turns into a maintenance burden by the third.
When building in-house makes sense
One or two simple, mostly-static sources and an engineer who can own it as a side responsibility. Don't buy a platform for that—a small script is the right call.
Where it stops being cheap
JS-rendered storefronts need a headless browser pool. Bot detection needs soft-block handling. Login-gated wholesale sites need session management. Every one of those is an on-call incident if you built it yourself, and none of them show up in the initial script's cost estimate.
Read more
See our full build vs buy comparison with a feature-by-feature breakdown on the compare hub.
Ready to try Scrapliy?
Turn competitor research into live catalogs, change alerts, and export-ready feeds.