Do I need anti-blocking infrastructure if I only scrape a few sites?

Maybe — but often yes, at least a little.

If you’re only scraping a few sites, you may get by without a full anti-blocking stack if:

• the sites are small and stable,
• request volume is low,
• you don’t need long-lived scraping,
• and you’re okay manually fixing failures.

But you’ll still commonly need some basic protections, because even “a few sites” can block you for reasons like:

• rate limits,
• IP reputation,
• bot detection,
• CAPTCHAs,
• changing HTML,
• session/cookie requirements.

Minimal anti-blocking setup

For a small scraper, I’d usually recommend:

• reasonable request throttling
• retry with backoff
• rotating user agents
• good session/cookie handling
• monitoring for failures
• respectful concurrency limits

You probably don’t need heavy infrastructure if:

• you’re scraping a public site once a day,
• the data is not time-sensitive,
• and occasional manual intervention is acceptable.

You probably do need more if:

• the site uses aggressive bot protection,
• you need high reliability,
• you’re scraping at scale,
• or downtime/data gaps are costly.

Practical rule of thumb

Start simple. Build the scraper first, then add anti-blocking only when you see:

• increasing 403/429s,
• CAPTCHA pages,
• inconsistent data collection,
• or bans.

If you want, I can help you decide based on your exact use case and suggest the lightest possible setup.