Unpopular Opinion: Stop Scraping HTML — Use These Free APIs Instead

I've been building web scrapers for years. Here's my controversial take: most web scraping tutorials teach you the wrong thing. They teach you to parse HTML. To fight with selectors. To handle dynamic JavaScript rendering. But 80% of the data you need is available through free public APIs that nobody talks about. The APIs Nobody Knows About PyPI has a JSON API. https://pypi.org/pypi/{package}/json — no key, no auth. YouTube has Innertube. Internal API, no quotas, no key. arXiv has a free search API. 2M+ papers, structured XML. PubMed returns medical research data in JSON. GitHub gives you repo data without a token. Crossref searches 130M+ research papers for free. WHOIS/RDAP returns domain registration data via REST. I documented all of them in my free APIs list — 200+ APIs that need zero registration. Why This Matters Every time you write a BeautifulSoup selector, you're: Building something fragile (one HTML change = broken scraper) Fighting anti-bot systems unnecessarily Ignoring str