4 lessons
Firecrawl and Managed Scraping APIs
What Firecrawl and similar services actually do underneath, when they're worth the cost, and how they compare to everything you built by hand.
crawl4ai and Open-Source Alternatives
Self-hosted, free alternatives to Firecrawl — crawl4ai, ScrapeGraphAI and Browser-use — and the real tradeoff between paying for a managed API and running the infrastructure yourself.
Apify: Ready-Made Scrapers for Popular Sites
How Apify Actors let you scrape Google Maps, Facebook, LinkedIn and other hard targets without writing selectors, and how to decide between Apify and Firecrawl.
Choosing the Right Tool for the Job
A practical decision process for picking between plain requests, browser automation frameworks, Scrapy and managed AI APIs — the synthesis of the whole course.