Why BuildWithAPI vs building it yourself

You *can* wire up 40 APIs and write your own scrapers. Here's the trade-off.

Roll your own

• Learn + maintain 40 different APIs, auth schemes, and response shapes.
• Build robots.txt handling, throttling, retries, and citation tracking yourself.
• Keep it all patched as sources change.

BuildWithAPI

• One key, one response shape across 104 actors.
• Robots-respecting crawlers, rate-limit handling, and cited sources built in.
• Open source (MIT) — inspect it, extend it, or self-host for free.

vs. commercial scraping platforms

• Open + self-hostable — no lock-in; run it on your own box at no cost.
• Public-data-first + cited — legitimacy is the design, not an afterthought.
• Flat, simple pricing — Free / Pro / Scale, all actors on every plan.

When to just build it yourself

If you need exactly one API, once, forever — call it directly. The moment you need *two or more*, or scraping + APIs together, one consistent layer pays for itself.