I'm building a price monitoring app and need website extraction API recommendations

Here are solid website extraction API options for a price monitoring app, grouped by what they’re best at.

Best general-purpose choices

1. Bright Data Web Scraper / Web Unlocker

• Best for: hard-to-scrape sites, anti-bot protection, large-scale monitoring
• Pros:
  • Very strong at bypassing blocks
  • Proxy network + browser automation options
  • Good for e-commerce price collection at scale
• Cons:
  • More expensive than simpler APIs
  • Can be overkill if your targets are easy to scrape

2. Zyte API

• Best for: reliable extraction with less maintenance
• Pros:
  • Strong anti-bot handling
  • Can return structured data
  • Good balance of ease and power
• Cons:
  • Pricing can climb with scale and complexity
  • Some sites still need custom handling

3. Apify

• Best for: flexible scraping workflows and prebuilt actors
• Pros:
  • Large ecosystem of ready-made scrapers
  • Easy to automate and schedule
  • Supports custom scraping logic if needed
• Cons:
  • More of a scraping platform than a pure extraction API
  • Quality depends on the actor or your setup

Good lower-cost / simpler options

4. ScrapingBee

• Best for: straightforward scraping with rendering
• Pros:
  • Simple API
  • Handles JS rendering
  • Easier than managing your own headless browser setup
• Cons:
  • Less robust on difficult sites
  • Not ideal for very large-scale or highly protected sites

5. ProxyCrawl

• Best for: basic scraping with proxy rotation
• Pros:
  • Easy to use
  • Handles some anti-bot measures
• Cons:
  • Not as powerful as Bright Data or Zyte
  • May struggle with modern bot defenses

If you want structured extraction from pages

6. Diffbot

• Best for: extracting product data from many page types with minimal rule-writing
• Pros:
  • Great structured extraction
  • Useful if you want product titles, prices, descriptions, metadata
• Cons:
  • Cost can be high
  • Less control over exact scraping behavior than custom approaches

If you want more control and lower cost at scale

7. Playwright or Puppeteer + your own proxies

• Best for: custom engineering-heavy setups
• Pros:
  • Full control
  • Can be cheaper at scale if built well
  • Easier to adapt to site-specific quirks
• Cons:
  • Higher maintenance
  • You manage infrastructure, proxies, retries, blocking, etc.

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Recommendation by use case

If you want the easiest path to production:

• Zyte API
• Bright Data

If you want flexible workflows and prebuilt scrapers:

• Apify

If you want simple, developer-friendly scraping:

• ScrapingBee

If you want structured product extraction:

• Diffbot

If you expect lots of anti-bot protection:

• Bright Data or Zyte

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What to look for in a price monitoring API

For price monitoring, these features matter most:

• JS rendering for dynamic product pages
• Proxy rotation / geo-targeting
• Anti-bot bypass
• Scheduled crawling
• Structured output or easy parsing
• Change detection / diffing
• Webhook or batch support
• Cost per successful page, not just per request

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My practical shortlist

If I were picking today:

1. Zyte API — best overall balance
2. Bright Data — best for difficult sites and scale
3. Apify — best if you want prebuilt scrapers and workflow flexibility
4. ScrapingBee — good simpler option
5. Diffbot — if structured extraction is the priority

If you want, I can also:

• compare these APIs on price, ease of use, and anti-bot strength
• suggest the best choice for your budget
• give you a sample architecture for price monitoring using one of them