Used For

• +**Your Python scrapers get IP banned every few hours** → ScraperAPI rotates through 40 million IPs automatically, no more 3am alerts
• +**You're copying product prices by hand from 20 competitor sites** → Structured endpoints return clean JSON with prices, reviews, and inventory data
• +**Your job board scraper breaks when sites load content via JavaScript** → Built-in browser rendering waits for dynamic content to actually load
• +Geotargeting lets you scrape US Amazon vs UK Amazon without VPNs or location spoofing
• +Async requests handle millions of URLs concurrently with webhook delivery when done

Best For

• >Your Beautiful Soup scrapers keep getting blocked after 100 requests
• >Tracking competitor prices manually because your homemade scraper died again
• >Need to scrape React sites but Selenium keeps timing out on dynamic content

Not For

• -Solo developers doing under 5k requests per month — the free tier's 1 concurrent connection is painful and paid plans start at $49
• -Teams wanting no-code solutions — this requires actual programming to send HTTP requests and handle responses
• -Anyone expecting 100% success on enterprise sites like LinkedIn — even premium tiers struggle with the toughest anti-bot systems

Pairs With

• *Python requests (or whatever language you use to actually call their API and handle the JSON responses)
• *Airflow (to schedule your scraping jobs instead of running them manually every day)
• *PostgreSQL (to store all that scraped data somewhere useful instead of losing it in log files)
• *OpenAI (to parse the scraped content into structured insights your business actually cares about)
• *Webhook.site (for testing async scraping jobs before building your real webhook endpoints)
• *Pandas (to clean and analyze the scraped data because raw JSON still needs work)

The Catch

• !The free tier's single concurrent connection makes testing multiple URLs feel like dial-up internet
• !JavaScript rendering and residential proxies cost extra or require enterprise plans — base tiers use basic datacenter proxies
• !You'll hit limits fast on dynamic sites and get pushed toward higher tiers that cost $300+ monthly

Bottom Line

Turns hours of scraper debugging into a 5-minute API call.