So for Scrapy and Portia, they are both free as in beer, specifically because we believe in the power of open source. Scrapy actually precedes Scrapinghub and was certainly not developed as a marketing tool.
Charges come with large scale crawls (above certain limits on our platform), additional products like Crawlera (our smart downloader that routes requests from a crawl through a pool of IP addresses to avoid bans), datasets, and for us to handle complex crawls for companies outsourcing to us.
Our model is that there is something for everyone whether you are looking to dip your toes into web scraping (free), use it occasionally (usually journalists) or dependent on web crawling for your business.
Right. I had first come across Scrapy, while browsing the web for Python software tools, some years ago, on the site of a company in Uruguay called Insophia. It was in the list of products developed by them, and that they worked on. Scrapinghub came later.
Charges come with large scale crawls (above certain limits on our platform), additional products like Crawlera (our smart downloader that routes requests from a crawl through a pool of IP addresses to avoid bans), datasets, and for us to handle complex crawls for companies outsourcing to us.
Our model is that there is something for everyone whether you are looking to dip your toes into web scraping (free), use it occasionally (usually journalists) or dependent on web crawling for your business.