I Spent 4 Days Hand-Rolling a Vinted Scraper. It Broke Me.

I Spent 4 Days Hand-Rolling a Vinted Scraper. It Broke Me. 🧵 It was 2:30 AM on a Wednesday. My eyes were burning, my terminal was throwing errors faster than I could read them, and I was seriously questioning my life choices. I just wanted to pull prices for 500 streetwear items across Europe to build a little arbitrage index. It sounded simple. Grab a proxy, fire up Puppeteer, scrape the DOM, and go to sleep. Four days later, I was still awake. My $5 VPS was officially dead. Here is exactly what went wrong when I tried to build my own scraper, and the humiliating but necessary pivot I had to make. The Proxy Bloodbath First, you hit the IP ban wall. You can't just send 100 requests from the same IP to a marketplace like this. They see you coming from a mile away. So, I bought a list of datacenter proxies. Banned within 10 minutes. I upgraded to residential proxies. $15 down the drain. They worked, until they didn't. The marketplace started checking TLS fingerprints. My headless Chrome