Website review
This review may include AI-generated content and is not individually verified. Domain, certificate and other facts come from the observed data on this page.
What is 80legs?
80legs is a web-scraping and crawling service built around a cloud platform. Rather than running crawlers on your own machines, you use its hosted infrastructure to fetch and extract data from websites at scale.
Its page lists three distinct offerings, which map to different levels of effort:
- Custom Web Crawling – you define and run your own crawls on the cloud platform.
- Giant Web Crawl – you pull custom data from an existing crawl of the web instead of crawling it yourself.
- Datafiniti – a way to skip scraping entirely and get access to web data directly.
The practical distinction is control versus convenience. Running your own crawl gives you the most say over which pages are visited and what gets extracted, but you take on the configuration and maintenance. Buying from a pre-built web crawl or an existing data product trades some of that control for speed, since the collection work is already done.
Who tends to use it: teams that need structured data from many pages — for example, a market-research analyst tracking product listings across hundreds of retail sites, or a data engineer feeding a pricing or lead-generation pipeline. The page also references customer logos, though it does not name specific use cases.
Next step: decide which of the three products matches your situation. If you need a specific, unusual set of fields from a defined group of sites, custom crawling is the natural fit. If you mainly need broad web data without building a crawler, look at Giant Web Crawl or Datafiniti first. Pricing is listed separately at 80legs under its Pricing page, so check there before committing.
How does 80legs differ from traditional web scraping tools?
80legs is built around cloud-based crawling rather than a desktop scraper you run on your own machine. Instead of installing and maintaining scraping software locally, you use its platform to run crawls at scale, and its page also points to two adjacent options: a "Giant Web Crawl" for pulling custom data from an existing crawl of the web, and Datafiniti for getting web data without scraping at all.
That changes the practical trade-offs:
- Setup and maintenance: Traditional tools often mean managing proxies, schedulers and servers yourself. 80legs' pitch is that crawling runs on its cloud-enabled platform, so you avoid owning that infrastructure.
- Scale: A cloud platform is generally better suited to large, recurring crawls than a script on one machine, which can be limited by your bandwidth and IP reputation.
- Control vs. convenience: A desktop or code-based scraper gives you fine-grained control over parsing and edge cases. A managed platform trades some of that control for less operational work.
- Buy vs. build: The Datafiniti option is the furthest from traditional scraping — you skip crawling and consume data directly, which can be faster but less tailored to unusual sources.
Next step: Decide based on your volume and team. If you need occasional, highly custom extraction from a handful of pages, a conventional scraper is usually simpler. If you need continuous crawling across many sites and don't want to run infrastructure, start with 80legs' cloud crawling; if you mainly need ready-made data, evaluate the Datafiniti route first.
You can compare options and pricing at 80legs.
What types of data can I extract using 80legs?
80legs is built around web crawling and scraping, so the data you can extract is essentially whatever appears on the pages you choose to crawl. Based on the platform's own description, it offers three routes to that data:
- Custom web crawling – run your own crawls on its cloud platform. You define the target sites and the extraction rules, so you can pull structured fields such as product names, prices, descriptions, reviews, listings, contact details, article text, or links.
- Giant Web Crawl – pull custom data from an existing crawl of the entire web, useful when you want broad coverage without crawling from scratch.
- Datafiniti – access web data directly instead of scraping it yourself, aimed at people who want the data rather than the crawling infrastructure.
In practice, the extractable data falls into common categories: e-commerce details (titles, prices, availability, ratings), directory and listing information (business names, addresses, categories), content (headlines, body text, publication dates), and links or URLs for mapping site structure. The limit is usually the page itself and the rules you write, not a fixed set of data types.
A useful next step is to decide between crawling and buying data. If you need a specific, changing set of sites and have some technical capacity, custom crawling gives you control. If you need broad coverage quickly and don't want to build crawlers, the Giant Web Crawl or Datafiniti route is likely the better fit. Check the 80legs pricing page to see which model matches your volume before committing.
How much does 80legs cost and what pricing plans are available?
80legs does not publish its prices on the page supplied here. The site has a Pricing page at 80legs, but the page evidence available does not list plan names, tiers, or dollar amounts, so any specific figure would be a guess. What the site does show is the shape of the offering: custom web crawling on a cloud platform, a “Giant Web Crawl” for pulling custom data from a crawl of the web, and Datafiniti for instant access to web data.
What to expect from pricing like this
Crawling services are usually priced on usage rather than a flat monthly fee. Common meters include:
- Number of pages or URLs crawled
- Compute time or concurrent crawlers
- Data volume or storage
- Frequency of re-crawls
- Whether you use a ready-made dataset instead of running your own crawl
That means the cheapest plan for one person tracking a few hundred pages may be very different from the cost for a team monitoring millions of product pages daily. The “Giant Web Crawl” and Datafiniti options are likely positioned as alternatives to running your own crawl, which can trade control and customization for less setup work.
How to get an actual number
Use the Pricing link on 80legs and, if no rates are listed, request a quote with your specific workload: target sites, page count, crawl frequency, and output format. Compare that quote against running your own crawler with a general-purpose tool if your needs are small or highly custom.
If you want a rough decision rule: for a one-off project under a few thousand pages, a self-managed crawler is often simpler to budget; for continuous, large-scale crawling where you would rather not maintain infrastructure, a managed service quote is the more realistic comparison.
Can I run my own web crawls on 80legs, and how does that work?
Yes. 80legs offers a product called Custom Web Crawling, which the site describes as letting you run your own web crawls on its cloud-enabled platform. So the model is: you define the crawl, and 80legs supplies the cloud infrastructure that executes it, rather than you running crawler software on your own machines.
What that means in practice
- You stay in control of the crawl. Because it is framed as "run your own web crawls," the target URLs, crawl scope and extraction rules are yours to specify. The platform is the execution layer, not a fixed data feed.
- You don't manage the crawling infrastructure. Cloud-based crawling shifts the burden of scale, scheduling and distributed fetching to the provider. That is the main trade-off: less operational work, but also less control over the underlying environment than a self-hosted crawler.
- It is distinct from the other options on the page. 80legs separates Custom Web Crawling (your own crawls) from Giant Web Crawl (pulling custom data from an existing crawl of the entire web) and Datafiniti (instant access to web data without scraping). If you need a specific, recurring crawl of your own target list, Custom Web Crawling is the relevant product; if you only need data that already exists in a large crawl, Giant Web Crawl may be a better fit.
A concrete scenario
Say you run competitive pricing research and need a nightly pass over a few thousand product pages. With Custom Web Crawling, you would configure those targets and the fields you want, then let the cloud platform handle the fetching at scale. A team without crawling infrastructure gets a working pipeline quickly; a team with strict requirements about IP ranges, request behaviour or data residency would want to confirm those details before committing.
Next step
Check the pricing page to see how Custom Web Crawling is metered — cloud crawling is typically billed by volume of pages or compute, which will be the deciding factor for a recurring crawl. You can find it at 80legs under Pricing. Before signing up, have a short list of target sites and the exact fields you need, so you can test whether the configuration options match your extraction requirements.
What is Datafiniti and how does it relate to 80legs?
Datafiniti is a product offered by 80legs that provides instant access to web data, positioned as an alternative to building and running your own scraper. Rather than configuring a crawl and managing the infrastructure yourself, you get the data directly.
On the 80legs site, Datafiniti sits alongside two other products:
| Product | What it does | Who it suits |
|---|---|---|
| Custom Web Crawling | Run your own crawls on 80legs' cloud platform | Teams with specific, changing targets who want control over extraction logic |
| Giant Web Crawl | Pull custom data from an existing crawl of the entire web | Users who want historical or broad coverage without crawling from scratch |
| Datafiniti | Skip scraping and get instant access to web data | Users who want usable data quickly and don't want to maintain scraping code |
The practical distinction is effort versus control. Custom crawling gives you the most flexibility but requires setup and ongoing maintenance when target sites change. Giant Web Crawl trades some freshness or specificity for breadth. Datafiniti trades customization for speed: you avoid the scraping step entirely, which matters if your team lacks engineering time or if you need data for analysis rather than for a scraping pipeline.
If you're deciding between them, start with the question of whether you need raw control over what gets collected. If the answer is no, and you mainly need the resulting data, Datafiniti is the logical entry point. Compare its coverage against your actual data requirements before committing, since "instant access" only helps if the available data matches your fields and update needs.
User reviews (0)