What is DIY scraping?
DIY scraping means you build and maintain the entire pipeline yourself:- A scraper (BeautifulSoup, Playwright, Puppeteer, Scrapy)
- A proxy layer for IP rotation
- Retry and error-handling logic
- A scheduler to run jobs on a recurring basis
What is Bright Data Scraper API?
Bright Data Scraper API is a collection of thousands of pre-built scrapers maintained by Bright Data’s engineering team, covering top sites including LinkedIn, Amazon, Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, Google Maps, and many more. You send a URL, you get structured JSON back, no parsing, no selectors, no proxy configuration. Each scraper returns a typed record. On September 6, 2026 a LinkedIn profile record carried 34 top-level fields and an Amazon product record 94, covering details like seller lists, map coordinates and structured metadata that most DIY scrapers miss. If your target site isn’t covered, you can build a custom scraper in minutes using Bright Data Scraper Studio: just pass a URL and a plain-language description of the data you need. When a site changes its frontend and breaks your scraper, the Self-healing tool rewrites the affected code based on a prompt, so you don’t need to dig into the script manually.The same scrape, two ways
Here’s what scraping an Amazon product page looks like with each approach. DIY with Playwright: you write and maintain every selector:Python
cURL
Response
How DIY and Scraper API compare
Which sites are supported
The scraper library includes ready-made scrapers across categories:
If your target isn’t in the library, Bright Data Scraper Studio can generate a custom scraper from a URL and a natural language description of the data you need.
Sync vs async collection
The Scraper API has two endpoints:/scrape returns results in the same response and is built for a handful of URLs, and /trigger runs a batch job and returns a snapshot_id to poll or deliver. A /scrape request that runs past 1 minute answers HTTP 202 with a snapshot_id and continues as a job. See Understanding sync vs. async requests for the comparison and Limits and constraints for the numbers.
When to use what
Limitations and tradeoffs
Predefined data fields. Each pre-built scraper returns a typed record, 11 to 94 top-level fields depending on the scraper when captured on September 6, 2026, which covers most use cases. If you need a field that isn’t included, you can use Bright Data Scraper Studio to customize the scraper’s output or fall back to Web Unlocker API for raw HTML. Latency. Sync scrapes typically return in seconds, but complex sites may take longer than 1 minute and answer HTTP 202 with asnapshot_id. If you need sub-second responses, you may want to cache results or use pre-scraped Datasets.