I sell scrapers on the Apify Store, which means I maintain them against live anti-bot systems every week. The posts here are the working notes from that: what actually defeats DataDome and Cloudflare in 2026, how to structure an Apify actor so it bills correctly, and where the legal and economic lines really sit.
Scraping has split into two worlds. Public, structured data is easier to collect than ever. Anything behind a serious bot-defense vendor is an arms race you pay for in residential-proxy bandwidth. Knowing which world your target lives in — before you write a line of code — is most of the job.
New to it, start with the web scraping beginner’s guide. For the anti-bot arms race, see the Byparr / Scrapling / FlareSolverr comparison. If you publish on Apify, the pay-per-event migration playbook covers the billing model change before October 2026.
