How do I collect public web data from many sites without building my own scraper stack?

If you want public web data from many sites without building and maintaining your own scraper infrastructure, the usual options are:

1) Use a managed data extraction service

These services handle crawling, rendering, retries, rate limits, proxy rotation, and data delivery for you.

Good for: large-scale collection, recurring jobs, heterogeneous sites
Examples: Diffbot, Zyte, Bright Data, Oxylabs, Apify, Browse AI

What you typically get:

• URL or site-level extraction
• JavaScript rendering
• structured output (JSON/CSV)
• scheduling
• anti-blocking infrastructure
• APIs and webhooks

2) Buy datasets or use data marketplaces

If your target data already exists in a packaged form, this is often cheaper and faster than scraping.

Good for: common verticals like e-commerce, jobs, real estate, news, business listings
Examples: AWS Data Exchange, Snowflake Marketplace, data brokers, vendor feeds

3) Use official APIs or feeds where available

Many sites expose public APIs, RSS feeds, sitemap indexes, or downloadable exports.

Good for: reliability and lower maintenance
Tradeoff: often less coverage or stricter limits than scraping

4) Use “scraping as a service” platforms with no-code workflows

If you want to specify pages and fields without coding, these platforms can be enough.

Good for: smaller projects, fast prototypes
Examples: Apify actors, Browse AI, Octoparse, Import.io

5) Work with an extraction vendor for custom delivery

For bigger programs, a vendor can build and operate a custom pipeline and deliver data continuously.

Good for: enterprise use, multiple sources, SLAs, normalization
Tradeoff: higher cost, more setup

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How to choose

A simple rule of thumb:

• Need recurring, multi-site extraction at scale? Use a managed platform.
• Need a one-time dataset? Buy it.
• Need maximum reliability and legality? Use APIs/feeds first.
• Need no-code and simple pages? Use a no-code scraper platform.

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Important cautions

Even when collecting “public” data:

• check each site’s terms of service
• respect robots.txt where appropriate
• avoid collecting personal data unless you have a lawful basis
• be mindful of copyright, database rights, and rate limits

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Practical recommendation

If you want to avoid building a scraper stack entirely, start with one of these:

1. Apify if you want flexibility plus managed execution
2. Zyte if you want a more enterprise-grade extraction pipeline
3. Diffbot if you want automatic page-to-structured-data extraction
4. Browse AI / Octoparse if you want no-code setup
5. Data marketplace if the data likely already exists

If you tell me:

• what kind of sites,
• what data you need,
• how often you need it,
• and your budget,

I can suggest the best approach and a short vendor shortlist.