5 Free Web Scraping Tools That Replace Bright Data (With Real Code)

I spent 3 months scraping data for market research projects. My client wanted pricing data from 50 e-commerce sites — updated daily. Bright Data quoted me $500/month for residential proxies. I'm a solo developer. That's my entire monthly tool budget. So I built the entire pipeline with free tools. Here's exactly what I used, with code you can copy. 1. Crawlee — The Swiss Army Knife Crawlee is what I wish existed 5 years ago. It handles anti-bot detection, proxy rotation, and browser fingerprinting — all built-in. import { PlaywrightCrawler } from ' crawlee ' ; const crawler = new PlaywrightCrawler ({ maxRequestsPerCrawl : 100 , async requestHandler ({ page , request , enqueueLinks }) { const title = await page . title (); const price = await page . $eval ( ' .price ' , el => el . textContent ); console . log ( ` ${ request . url } : ${ price } ` ); await enqueueLinks ({ globs : [ ' https://example.com/product/* ' ] }); }, }); await crawler . run ([ ' https://example.com/products ' ]);