11 Cheapest Ways to Scrape Data Legally

Most "scraping" projects don't need scraping at all. Here are 11 ways to get the data without the legal/technical headache.

1. RSS feeds (free, no auth)

Every blog, news site and podcast has an RSS feed. Pull updates instantly without scraping.

2. Public APIs

Reddit JSON (/r/<sub>/.json), HackerNews Algolia API, Wikipedia API, IMDb (limited free tier) — all free, all reliable.

3. OpenStreetMap (Overpass API)

Free, unrestricted. Every restaurant, school, store, ATM in the world. Our /tools/downloads/lead-gen.zip uses this.

4. Common Crawl

15TB+ of pre-scraped web data, free. AWS S3 access. Massive quantitative datasets without making a single request.

5. Kaggle datasets

Hundreds of thousands of public datasets. Often the data you want already exists.

6. data.gov / data.gov.uk / data.gov.in

Government open data. Census, economic, geographic, weather — all free, mostly CSV.

7. SimilarWeb / SemRush free tiers

Top sites, traffic estimates, competitor analysis — both have generous free tiers.

8. GitHub API

Free 5K req/hour for authenticated requests. Mine repos, issues, contributors.

9. Internet Archive Wayback Machine

Historical snapshots. Free API. Useful for "what did this page say 6 months ago".

10. Google Custom Search JSON API

100 free queries/day. Beats scraping SERPs directly.

11. RapidAPI marketplace

Thousands of APIs with free tiers — Indeed jobs, Twitter, news, weather. Often cheaper than building a scraper.

When to actually scrape

When the data exists nowhere else AND the ToS doesn't prohibit it AND it's not personal data AND you respect robots.txt.

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