While it may sound like data extraction or automation software is the cheapest given there are no fees apart from the initial setup fee, there are following additional costs & challenges you may need to be aware of. So be careful with the following costs that might eat in to your budget.
IP Rotation costs
Most websites block your IP address after several attempts of extracting data or automating tasks. So you need to rotate your IP addresses to load the website pages continuously. IP costs can be usually anywhere between 50$ - 3000$+ depending on how much data you want to collect or how many tasks you want to automate.Captcha solving costs
Some websites protect their websites from various Captcha challenges to prevent automation. So you would need to purchase a Captcha solving service as well. Captcha solving costs can be anywhere between 10$ - 1000$ + depending on how much data you want to collect or how many tasks you want to automate.
Website Detection Challenges
Some websites continuously monitor the incoming traffic and prevent you running softwares against the website. This can happen if you are sending requests with too much speed or doing it in a way that prevents other users using the website in a normal access speed. They can even change the website underlying web API to prevent your access to the website. So it’s best to let our experts get the data or perform automation tasks for you in an efficient manner using our cloud packages instead of running your own softwares, because we cannot guarantee your software won’t stop functioning properly for reasons outside out of control.
So if you have a fixed budget, its best to setup a Cloud Data Extraction Job to complete your project.
If you are not 100% sure whether to choose a data extraction software or setup a cloud data extraction job, you can read this article