Are you suggesting that if somebody wanted to setup a basic scrapper, they should learn how to install python, use packages, figure out how the webpage is structured, and dig through the page source to figure out how to extract their data?

This project has a decent visual data picker, interface, etc. You could literally hand it to a non-programmer, and have them scraping comments off hacker news without any programming knowledge at all.

I get paid over 25$/hr professionally as a programmer. This project costs 40$ one time. I'm not saying it's worth the money, but all it has to do is save somebody 2 hours of time.

If you are a programmer then this project likely isn't for you.

(Alternate smart-ass reply: Surely you coded the browser, operating system, and network stack involved in posting this response by yourself, right?)

No because they were all free.

And I suck too.

But it was free.

I mean...

soup.find(id="link3") # <a class="sister" href="http://example.com/tillie" id="link3">Tillie</a>

Is this hard?

There's also the aspect of downloading the page in the first place and dealing with things like authentication and bot detection which a product like this helps solve.

I personally don't have a use for this product right now, but I won't be so bold as to say I'll never find a case where using it wouldn't be easier or more cost-effective than hacking up my own solution.

"Soup? Python? What's an 'id'? class? href? I just want to select the title!"