As long as you are able to source more than one provider, this can work well enough. If you're dependent on a single data source, e.g., because that source is t

As long as you are able to source more than one provider, this can work well enough. If you're dependent on a single data source, e.g., because that source is the only possible source of said data, you'll get nuked from orbit by legal rather than technical means. I had a business that was generating more money than my full-time job for a while. We helped and greatly simplified matters for several thousand independent proprietors while having a positive effect on the load of the data source, since we were able to batch/coalesce requests, make better use of caches, and take notification responsibilities on ourselves. Once in a while someone would get worried and grumpy at the data source and there were a couple of cat-and-mouse games, but we easily outwitted their scraping detection each time. When they got tired of losing the technical game, they sent out the lawyers, which was far more effective. We were acquiring facts about dates and times from the place that issued/decided those dates and times, so there wasn't really any reliable alternative data source, and we had to shut down. The glimmer of hope on the horizon is LinkedIn v. HiQ, which seems poised to potentially finally overturn 4 decades of anti-scraping case law, but not holding my breath too hard there.