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API migration

Migrating From Scrape.do to a Web Scraping API: A Provider-Neutral Guide

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To migrate from Scrape.do, first inventory how your integration accesses it and which page behaviors your application depends on. Then map those behaviors—not just parameter names—to the replacement API’s documented contract, validate both providers against representative pages, and cut over gradually with rollback available. Because no destination provider is specified here, there is no safe, universal endpoint or code change to prescribe.

How do I migrate from Scrape.do to a web scraping API?

Treat the change as a provider-contract migration. A successful HTTP response from a new service does not by itself prove that it returned equivalent page content, used the intended region or session, or followed the same rendering and retry behavior. Preserve only the behaviors your application needs, confirm each against the destination provider’s current documentation, and test the resulting data before routing production traffic.

The steps below apply whether your current integration is synchronous or asynchronous. The exact destination endpoint, authentication format, request parameters, response schema, and code changes depend on the provider you choose.

1. Inventory the current integration

Search source code, deployment configuration, secrets management, and operational dashboards for:

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  • The Scrape.do API base URL, token handling, and target-URL encoding.
  • Query parameters and any HTTP method or request-body assumptions.
  • Proxy host, port, credential construction, TLS handling, and custom-header behavior.
  • Geography, proxy class, sessions, cookies, headers, JavaScript rendering, waits, timeouts, and retries.
  • Response parsing, status and error handling, billing or usage monitoring, and concurrency controls.
  • Async job creation, task IDs, polling, webhooks, result retrieval, cancellation, and expiration handling.

Classify each setting as required, optional, or obsolete. An option someone once experimented with is not automatically part of the production contract. Keep an example of the current request and response for each important workload, with credentials removed.

2. Identify the access mode

Scrape.do API Mode and Proxy Mode are different ways to access the service. In API Mode, the application sends a request to an API and supplies a target URL. Scrape.do’s getting-started documentation says the target URL must be URL-encoded so it is not interpreted as multiple query parameters. In Proxy Mode, ordinary HTTP(S) traffic is routed through proxy.scrape.do on port 8080, with the token and parameters placed in proxy credentials. Scrape.do documents TLS certificate implications and states that customHeaders=true is the default in Proxy Mode. It also says the two modes use the same subscription.

Record which mode your application actually uses. Do not assume a destination API offers both modes, accepts the same credential format, or interprets forwarded headers the same way.

3. Make a behavior map

Create one row for every behavior the application relies on. For each row, record the old setting, why it matters, the destination provider’s documented equivalent, and how you will test equivalence. Mark unsupported or undocumented behavior plainly rather than silently dropping it.

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Behavior to map What to verify at the destination Useful validation
Target URL and encoding How the URL is passed, encoded, and parsed; supported schemes Test URLs with query strings, reserved characters, and fragments where relevant
Authentication and HTTP contract Token location, supported methods, required headers or body, and secret-handling guidance Check success and invalid-credential responses without exposing a token in logs
Proxy class and geography Available routing types and regions, plus any restrictions Compare a representative target from each region your application needs
Session, cookies, and headers Persistence rules, cookie support, header forwarding, and custom-header defaults Use a page whose output changes with session state or a required header
JavaScript rendering and waits Whether rendering is supported and what wait conditions are available Compare a static page with a JavaScript-heavy page and check required fields
Timeouts, retries, and errors Timeout limits, retry behavior, error categories, and charging rules Observe failure and retry outcomes in a controlled test
Output and concurrency Response format, synchronous limits, async options, and rate limits Validate parsing and throughput under expected workload shape

Scrape.do documents controls for proxy class and geography, sessions, headers, rendering, waits, and retries. Their presence does not mean every integration needs them. Preserve only what your application depends on, and verify the destination’s behavior from its own documentation.

What changes if the integration uses Scrape.do Proxy Mode?

A proxy integration may not contain a conventional API request in the application code: it may configure an HTTP client to connect to a proxy and encode credentials there. Inventory the proxy host and port, credential-building logic, TLS certificate handling, and any code that relies on forwarded or custom headers. Then confirm the replacement provider’s proxy support and the client-specific configuration in its documentation.

Do not copy Scrape.do’s host, port, credential layout, or defaults into a new provider configuration unless that provider documents them. A changed proxy path can affect which headers reach the target, whether TLS requests succeed, and whether a session remains stable across requests. Test the application’s real HTTP client and deployment environment, not just a hand-written request that bypasses them.

How should asynchronous scraping be migrated?

Async processing is a separate contract from a synchronous request. Scrape.do documents an Async API at https://q.scrape.do, authenticates it with an X-Token header, and provides job and task endpoints. Its documented flow includes concurrency, polling or webhooks, status and error handling, and result expiration.

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For workloads that use this flow, adapt and test each lifecycle step rather than replacing only the job-creation request:

  1. Submit work: map job creation, payload shape, authentication, and the response fields that identify the job or task.
  2. Persist identifiers: store the IDs needed to resume processing after an application restart; do not rely on in-memory state alone.
  3. Receive completion: implement the destination’s documented polling or webhook contract. If polling, use bounded exponential backoff rather than continuously polling at a fixed, aggressive rate.
  4. Interpret results: map success, partial completion, failure, and retryable versus non-retryable errors to application behavior.
  5. Retrieve and retain output: fetch results before the destination’s documented expiration and decide how your system handles a missed deadline.
  6. Handle cancellation and concurrency: confirm whether the destination supports cancellation and how its limits apply to your workload.

Scrape.do recommends exponential backoff for polling, webhooks for production, and retrieving results before expiration. Those recommendations describe its documented service; recheck the replacement provider’s current endpoints, limits, delivery guarantees, and retention rules instead of assuming they transfer unchanged.

How do I compare costs and limits fairly?

Do not convert an old credit count directly into a new provider’s request count or price. Scrape.do’s request-cost documentation lists base costs for untargeted domains of 1 credit for a standard datacenter request, 5 for a rendered request, 10 for residential or mobile routing, and 25 for residential or mobile routing with rendering. Its documentation also describes domain-specific defaults and identifies the Scrape.do-Request-Cost response header as the authoritative cost for an actual call. These are Scrape.do figures from documentation inspected on September 29, 2026—not a forecast of your workload’s cost or a comparable unit at another provider.

Scrape.do’s pricing page, inspected on September 29, 2026, listed a free tier with 1,000 successful API credits per month and five concurrent requests, alongside paid plans. Treat that as a dated snapshot: verify current prices, limits, and terms directly before making a purchasing decision. Credit usage can depend on proxy and rendering choices and may vary by target domain.

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For the replacement, test representative domains at realistic volume and compare the effective cost of valid results, not simply the price per request. Include failed attempts and retries, proxy and rendering surcharges, geography, concurrency, asynchronous throughput, and any domain-specific charges. Check whether response metadata exposes actual usage or cost, and decide how your application will monitor it.

How should I validate the replacement before cutover?

Run the old and new implementations against a small but representative set of pages before changing production routing. No provider comparison or migration test is implied here; the validation below is an engineering procedure for your own workload.

  1. Choose coverage: include static and JavaScript-heavy pages, each required region, session-dependent pages, and targets that currently need elevated proxy handling.
  2. Use the same inputs: keep target URLs, relevant headers, cookies, session conditions, and timing expectations consistent where the two contracts allow it.
  3. Check content, not just status: compare status codes, page completeness, extracted fields, missing or malformed values, and any downstream validation rules.
  4. Measure operations: record latency, errors, retry outcomes, concurrency or queue behavior, and effective cost for successful results.
  5. Set acceptance criteria: decide in advance what counts as equivalent output and acceptable error, latency, and cost before looking at the result.
  6. Protect secrets: keep tokens in a secret store or protected environment configuration, and redact them from request logs, traces, and error reports.

How do I switch traffic without losing rollback?

Once the destination passes validation, route a limited portion of production traffic to it and monitor content validity, errors, cost, latency, and queue or concurrency behavior. Increase the share only after your acceptance criteria hold for the relevant workload. Keep the old integration deployable and maintain a clear way to route traffic back while the new one is being validated. A feature flag or provider selection setting can make that operational path easier to control.

For every increase, check both technical health and the data consumers’ results. A low transport-error rate is not enough if pages are incomplete or extracted fields have changed. Keep a record of the provider configuration and test corpus used for the cutover so later changes can be distinguished from the migration itself.

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How to replace a browser-based screenshot step

If one part of your workflow captures visual screenshots rather than extracting structured page data, a screenshot service may be a fit for that part—but it is not a general replacement for a web scraping API. ScreenshotNeo is a website screenshot API and MCP server from Yorker Media for returning page captures as PNG, JPEG, WebP, or PDF. It can handle visual capture without making you operate a browser for that step. It does not turn a screenshot into the structured fields your scraper may need.

Or skip the browser setup

For a visual capture, make a GET request with the target URL. The example saves the returned image bytes to a file; see the ScreenshotNeo API documentation for request options and response details.

curl -G "https://api.screenshotneo.com/v1/shot" -d access_key=YOUR_API_KEY --data-urlencode url=https://stripe.com -o shot.webp

ScreenshotNeo removes cookie and consent banners, newsletter popups, and chat widgets before capture; each cleanup step can be turned off. Bot checks or CAPTCHAs, blank pages, timeouts, failed loads, and cache hits are not billed, and response headers indicate the page verdict and billing status. Its MCP server offers take_screenshot, get_page_info, and capture_pdf for AI agents and other MCP clients. The free plan includes 1,000 screenshots per month without a card; paid plans start at $5 for 3,000 shots. Create a free ScreenshotNeo account to try it.

Common migration failures and fixes

  • The destination returns an error for a target URL: check how the new API expects the URL to be supplied and encoded. Scrape.do’s API-mode URL-encoding requirement is not proof that another provider uses the same request format.
  • The request succeeds but extracted content is missing: verify whether the old integration depended on JavaScript rendering, a wait condition, cookies, custom headers, geography, or a sticky session. Test each dependency against the destination’s documented behavior.
  • Proxy requests fail during TLS setup: review the destination’s TLS and certificate instructions and the HTTP client’s proxy configuration. Do not assume Scrape.do Proxy Mode’s certificate implications apply identically elsewhere.
  • Headers differ at the target: compare application-supplied headers with what the destination forwards, and check custom-header defaults. Test using the production client path.
  • Async jobs appear stuck or results are missing: confirm the destination’s status lifecycle, webhook or polling requirements, authentication, result retrieval procedure, and retention window. Persist IDs and retrieve results within the documented period.
  • Usage rises unexpectedly: separate base requests, rendering, proxy class, retries, and domain-specific charges. Compare actual usage metadata where available; for Scrape.do calls, its documentation identifies Scrape.do-Request-Cost as the actual-call cost indicator.
  • A rollout looks healthy but downstream data changes: compare extracted values and completeness against known-good outputs, then check whether the discrepancy is caused by page timing, session state, region, or response parsing before increasing traffic.

What to confirm with the destination provider

Before committing to a replacement, make sure its current documentation answers the questions that affect your workload:

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  • How are authentication, target URLs, HTTP methods, and request bodies represented?
  • Which proxy types and geographic locations are available, and how are sessions, cookies, and headers handled?
  • Can it render JavaScript, and what wait controls and timeout limits are supported?
  • What are the status and error semantics, retry behavior, and rules for charging failed attempts?
  • What are the synchronous and asynchronous concurrency limits, batch options, webhook behavior, and result-retention period?
  • How can usage be measured, and what are the provider’s current service limits, data-retention terms, and support commitments?

The answers determine the implementation. In the absence of a named destination, a provider-specific endpoint map, executable replacement scraper code, or a provider ranking would be guesswork.

Frequently Asked Questions

Can I use the same Scrape.do token with another scraping API?

Do not assume so. Credentials and authentication formats are provider-specific; create and configure credentials according to the destination provider’s documentation.

Is a screenshot API the same thing as a web scraping API?

No. A screenshot API returns a visual capture; a scraping API is used to retrieve page content for workflows such as extracting structured data. Choose based on the output your application needs.

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