Technical reality of large scale data extractions and webscraping

If you wanna buy scraping services, pay good attention and read, I do not care and am probably too expensive to be comptitive with all the liars and BS artists selling scraping services.

So a guy from here got in touch and wanted 1 million pages scraped from a real estate businesses, and he has shown me some proposals, hilarious videos of scammers(shame on you, you are on this very forum but shall remain unnamed, I wish so much you were not on this forum) and the general offers would be around 2000 usd ofr a data set which requires effectively downloading 1 million web pages, effectively, I have checked the structure, the protections etc.

Ever heard of scraping competitions? I did, there is something called the 5-Second window of opportunity

In scraping competitions, winners typically get **4-5 seconds** before IP nuking. Let's do the math:

## Stage 1: The Single IP Reality

### What One IP Can Actually Do:

**Maximum lifespan before detection:** 4-5 seconds (generous)
**Requests possible in that window:** 2-3 pages (with perfect timing)
**Why so few?** Zillow's layered detection:
1. Request #1: Baseline fingerprint
2. Request #2: Behavioral pattern established
3. Request #3: Confirmation of automation
4. Request #4+: IP blocked (403/429)

**Result per IP:** 2-3 pages, then permablocked from Zillow.

## Stage 2: Scaling Problems Begin

### Attempt 1: Datacenter Proxies (The Naive Approach)

**Cost:** $10-50/month for 100 IPs
**Reality:** All IPs from known ranges (AWS, GCP, Azure, Hetzner, OVH)
**Zillow's response:** Instant block - these IPs never get past request #1
**Lifespan:** 0 pages per IP
**Result:** $50 wasted, 0 data collected

### Attempt 2: Residential Proxies (The Expensive Truth)

**Cost:** $5-15 per GB (accurate)
**Zillow page size:** ~500KB compressed (accurate estimate)
**Bandwidth math:**
1,000,000 pages × 0.5MB = 500,000MB = 500GB
500GB × $5/GB = $2,500 just for bandwidth

So now you fucking tell me how you will be delivering the project for 2000 usd dollars, fellow posters.

People from THIS forum have made these sub 2k offers, the BANDWITH alone is more expensive than the deliver price.

Want me to continue, listing the next challenges and how the devg also needs to eat something?

I will not, use your own brain and if you get scammed, well done, you believing things like 2k for a million pages is why I have to justify my price and waste time, if you wanna pay 2 grand for 1million data sets froma heavily captcha infested and anti fraud protected website, fell free to do so, you will get exactly jack fkn shit for it, you will be scammed.

I hope this helps

I remember once someone on upwork wanted me to scrape 1M pages from a well protected website for 600$ xDDDD
i was like "wtf is this dude smoking". Some people's brains should be studied fr.

I am on a datacenter IP and can open Zillow fine. Could you please tell me what you were trying to scrape, so I can get an idea of how competitive it is?

Oh and perhaps, you want to add a little bit OPSEC overhead there, they did and will absolutely litigate against industrial scrapers, the avergae fine , from what I see was 500k usd, this can be avoided if you are careful or safely out of jurisdiction.

I have the URL structure and paths down, but yeah, even with DC proxies and captch resolvers working fine, pulling this off for 2k within a reasonable amount of time, I do not see it

here example of 300M domains processed for dns data & +2M shopify stores scraped & processed with less than 1K$