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 as soon as they are published, 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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