Why we stopped maintaining our own web scraping stack

We originally built web scraping in-house because it felt like the obvious choice. Full control, no vendor lock-in, and on paper it looked cheaper.

What we didn’t expect was how quickly maintenance became the real cost:

• scripts breaking after small site changes

• silent data corruption that slipped past alerts

• growing QA effort once SKUs scaled

• engineers spending more time fixing pipelines than building product

At some point the question stopped being “can we build this?” and became “should we be spending our time on this at all?”

We ended up building an internal layer to handle extraction, validation, and SKU matching more reliably — and eventually turned it into a product.

Not here to sell, genuinely curious: At what point did scraping or data collection become a distraction for your team? Did you keep it in-house, outsource it, or buy a tool?

Happy to share lessons learned if useful.