Oxylabs is too expensive for recurring crawls

Yes — if you need recurring crawls, Oxylabs can get expensive quickly.

A few cheaper paths to consider:

1. Build your own crawling stack

   • Use requests/httpx + BeautifulSoup/lxml for static pages
   • Add Playwright or Selenium only where JavaScript is required
   • Rotate proxies only for the targets that need them

2. Use lower-cost proxy providers

   • Residential proxies are the biggest cost driver
   • For many recurring crawls, datacenter proxies or ISP proxies can be enough
   • Some providers are much cheaper than Oxylabs for moderate volumes

3. Reduce crawl frequency and scope

   • Crawl only changed pages
   • Use ETags, Last-Modified, sitemap diffs, or feed endpoints
   • Incremental crawling usually cuts cost a lot

4. Use scraping platforms with usage-based pricing

   • If you don’t want to manage infrastructure, compare alternatives like:
     • Bright Data
     • Smartproxy
     • Apify
     • ZenRows
     • ScraperAPI
   • Pricing varies a lot by target type and JS needs

5. Hybrid approach

   • Use in-house crawling for easy targets
   • Use a paid provider only for hard targets with anti-bot protection

If you want, I can help you:

• estimate the monthly cost for your crawl,
• compare cheaper alternatives to Oxylabs,
• or design a lower-cost recurring crawling setup.