2 ms·

Damn. I'm just really glad to know I'm not the only one. One of my company's biggest sellers is a tool that does web scraping. And since we charge a monthly fe

Damn. I'm just really glad to know I'm not the only one. One of my company's biggest sellers is a tool that does web scraping. And since we charge a monthly fee for it (I don't think most people realize that our server fees alone run nearly $2,000 a month for this, and that's with amazing deals on web hosting), we get a lot of "Pfft--how hard could that really be to build?" The answer is: It's easy--if you're only scraping one site, in small quantities. The minute you try to implement in Unicode (we have) or bundle it all in a report, or keep an ongoing cache of what your scraper found, or heck, scale it to millions of scrapes per month, all cached and indexed--now you are looking at something difficult. We have a talented team, we're 16 months into this, and we've since seen competitors pop up all over the place. They all get a few customers and then run into scaling issues. It's one of those markets that seems seductively easy, but really isn't. And since there are many competitors lowballing, we've had to focus even more development time on awesome features to stay ahead of the curve. I wish articles like this woke people up. Unfortunately, once you're committed and have a few customers, it's easy to rationalize going deeper. But web scraping can be a tricky industry to turn a profit in, especially if you are relying on a small and fickle customer base.

dspillett 15y ago
> And since there are many competitors lowballing, we've had to focus even more development time on awesome features to stay ahead of the curve. That is always the way, in any industry (those producing real holdable products as well as those of us producing code and other less tangible output). If you make something good and charge fairly for it, someone else will make a lower quality version & sell it cheaper and people will start expecting you to match that price without dropping any quality. The problem with software is that you often can't see the corners that have been cut until much later than with physical products (where you might have a chance of spotting the shoddy workmanship before you hand over any money), so competing on quality can be difficult (the competition can make the same quality claims as you can, whether they be true or not) meaning you end up having to compete on features.

dspillett 15y ago

> And since there are many competitors lowballing, we've had to focus even more development time on awesome features to stay ahead of the curve. That is always the way, in any industry (those producing real holdable products as well as those of us producing code and other less tangible output). If you make something good and charge fairly for it, someone else will make a lower quality version & sell it cheaper and people will start expecting you to match that price without dropping any quality. The problem with software is that you often can't see the corners that have been cut until much later than with physical products (where you might have a chance of spotting the shoddy workmanship before you hand over any money), so competing on quality can be difficult (the competition can make the same quality claims as you can, whether they be true or not) meaning you end up having to compete on features.