I replaced my scraping stack with one API for a week. Here's what I learned.

This week I tried an experiment.

Instead of running my own Playwright setup with rotating proxies and browser management, I used Geekflare's Web Scraping API (https://geekflare.com/api/webscraping/) for one of my side projects.

A few observations:

• No browser infrastructure to maintain.
• JavaScript-heavy pages worked without extra configuration.
• Development time was noticeably shorter.
• The trade-off is paying for convenience instead of maintaining your own stack.

It's probably not the right solution for every project, but for MVPs and internal automation it was a pleasant surprise.

Has anyone else switched from self-hosted scraping to an API? What was your experience?