How Does 80legs' Cloud-Based Web Crawling Work?

80legs runs web crawls on its own cloud-enabled platform, so you define what to collect and the crawling happens on 80legs' infrastructure rather than on your machine. That makes it a fit for teams that need large-scale or custom web data collection without standing up and babysitting their own crawler fleet. The site presents three distinct products — Custom Web Crawling, Giant Web Crawl, and Datafiniti — and the right choice depends on whether you want to run your own crawl, pull from an existing web-scale crawl, or skip scraping entirely.

The core model: you configure, 80legs crawls

The central idea is that 80legs provides the crawling engine and cloud capacity; you provide the target and the rules. You specify the sites or pages you care about and the data you want extracted, and the crawl executes on 80legs' cloud platform.

This differs from a local scraping setup in two practical ways:

• Scale is handled for you. Because crawling runs on cloud infrastructure, you are not limited by your own bandwidth, IP pool, or machine uptime.
• Customization is the point. The platform is described as customizable web scraping, meaning the extraction logic is tailored to the data you need rather than fixed to a preset template.

The trade-off is the usual one for managed crawling: you gain scale and reduced operational burden, but you work within the platform's configuration model instead of writing and running arbitrary code on your own terms.

The three products and when each applies

80legs groups its offering into three products. They solve related but different problems, and picking the wrong one is the most common source of confusion.

The progression is essentially: run your own crawl → query an existing large crawl → buy prepared data. Each step trades control for convenience.

Custom Web Crawling

This is the option to choose when you know your targets and your extraction needs. You configure the crawl, and 80legs executes it on the cloud platform. Use this when the data is on specific sites you can name and the value is in getting exactly those fields.

Giant Web Crawl

This is for when you want custom data but would rather not re-crawl the web yourself. 80legs maintains a crawl of the entire web, and you pull the data you need from it. The advantage is speed and avoided duplicate crawling; the constraint is that you can only get what that crawl already covers.

Datafiniti

Datafiniti is positioned as the "skip web scraping" option — instant access to web data. Choose it when the operational work of crawling is the problem you want removed entirely, and prepared data meets your needs.

How to decide

Work backward from your constraints:

• If you need specific fields from specific sites and want control → Custom Web Crawling.
• If your targets are broad and likely already crawled → Giant Web Crawl.
• If you don't want to run or manage crawling at all → Datafiniti.

A useful check: if you can name the exact URLs and the exact fields, Custom Web Crawling is the natural fit. If you can describe the data but not the exact pages, Giant Web Crawl is worth evaluating. If you'd rather not think about crawling mechanics at all, look at Datafiniti.

What to verify before committing

The site's product pages describe capabilities but do not, in the material available here, spell out pricing tiers or usage limits. Since cost and structure matter for a decision at this scale, check the pricing page directly before choosing a product. Also confirm two things for your specific use case:

• Coverage — for Giant Web Crawl, whether the pages you need are actually in the crawl.
• Extraction fit — for Custom Web Crawling, whether your target fields can be configured the way you need.

Those two checks resolve most of the uncertainty that remains after picking a product.