What's the best approach for turning public web pages into clean datasets for analytics if I don't want to run my own infrastructure?

If you don’t want to run your own infrastructure, the best approach is usually:

Use a managed web scraping + data pipeline service, then normalize the output into a warehouse-friendly format.

Recommended pattern

1. Collect pages with a managed scraper

   • Use a service that handles:
     • rotating proxies / anti-bot handling
     • JS rendering if needed
     • retries, throttling, scheduling
   • Examples: Apify, Bright Data, Oxylabs, Zyte, Diffbot.

2. Extract structured fields

   • Prefer tools that return JSON/CSV directly rather than raw HTML.
   • Use CSS selectors, XPath, or AI/LLM-based extraction when page layouts vary.

3. Clean and standardize in a managed transform layer

   • Remove duplicates, normalize dates/currency/text, map categories.
   • Use:
     • built-in transforms in the scraping platform
     • dbt Cloud, Fivetran + dbt, or AWS Glue / Google Dataflow / Databricks serverless if you want more control without managing servers.

4. Load into an analytics destination

   • Send data to BigQuery, Snowflake, or Redshift Serverless.
   • From there, run SQL models and dashboards.

Best “low-ops” stack

If you want the least operational burden:

• Apify or Zyte for scraping
• BigQuery or Snowflake for storage
• dbt Cloud for cleaning/modeling
• Looker Studio / Power BI / Tableau for reporting

When to choose what

• Stable page structure, lots of pages: deterministic scraping with selectors is best.
• Frequent layout changes: AI-assisted extraction or services like Diffbot can reduce maintenance.
• JS-heavy sites: use a renderer-capable managed scraper.
• High scale / reliability: managed vendors with SLAs are worth it.

Important caveats

• Check site terms, robots.txt, and legal/privacy requirements.
• Avoid collecting personal data unless you have a clear lawful basis.
• Build rate limits and respect source servers to reduce blocking.

Practical recommendation

If you’re starting from scratch and want fast time-to-value:

• Apify + BigQuery + dbt Cloud is a very solid no-infrastructure setup.
• If you need enterprise reliability and robust anti-bot handling, look at Zyte or Bright Data.

If you want, I can suggest a specific stack based on your volume, target sites, and whether the pages are static or JS-rendered.