Relevant Scraping/Crawling Lead Mining Tools:
http://apifier.com (favs)
http://apifier.com (favs)
https://github.com/scrapinghub/portia/ (our open source equivalent of Kimonolabs)
http://scrapy.org (allows to scrape more complex sites; also OSS)
http://scrapinghub.com (for a cloud-based platform and a smart proxy rotator)
(Disclaimer: working there.)
More seriously though, it's basically a bargain. You get:
- Access to the largest team of Scrapy, Portia, and Frontera experts around at your fingertip.
- AWS functionality for actually less than what it would cost you to set things up yourself (think VBR IP over ATM).
- Smart proxy rotating tech at your fingertip with tens of thousands of IP addresses spread across a slew of different IP networks.
- Built-in integrations with a growing list of third parties.
The list could go on and on... It's definitely not pricey. :-)