[TheEspion]

We target businesses that want to fulfil their web data extraction needs in-house rather than hiring a third-party provider – which we originally are. Espion was built for our own needs at first and we’re still in the customer discovery phase. I expect we’ll find many use cases in the coming months.

[softdev12]

The general sentiment on this thread pretty much sums up the idea of "scraping as a service". To me, there is definitely a legitimate business need to be able scrape. Whether people realize it or not, companies have in-house teams that build custom scraping tools. The challenge for you is going to be able to siphon out the bad actors that may use your service to do things that you would not approve of.

[xyby]

    businesses that want to fulfil their web data extraction needs in-house

Well, since you offer a web scrape tool, that's obvious :) But who is the typical customer who wants to do that?

[ivanhoe]

As someone who provides the scrapping services for years I can indeed confirm there's a lot of totally legit businesses who need the ability to compile the various online data. From press clipping/ soc. media trends monitoring, over various data-mining & analysis tasks, to price comparison and building dropship inventories. This days everyone talks about big data and data analysis, but you first need to collect that data.