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by 0x445442 2331 days ago
My guess is hiQ (and others) would happily pay for an API over the data they're scraping right now.
2 comments

Unless the costs exceed their current operational costs. Don't forget the time spent redeveloping on the new API, which includes validating everything is there, testing and cleaning up and removing the old (working) code.
Why buy the cow when you get the milk for free?
This isn't a great analogy here - getting the data delivered via API is simply more useful than having to re-assemble that data out of fragments parsed off of different web calls.

Could I suggest:

"Why buy the cheese when you get the milk for free?"