Building a pricing tracker meant scraping pricing pages. Everyone in the category does it. I checked the terms on the first source, found they didn't allow it, and emailed them instead.
That became 204 sources reviewed one at a time. Terms, robots, whether caching a snapshot counts as redistribution. Some yes, some silence, a few no, which left holes in my data I still haven't filled. Four months gone. Two competitors shipped the same idea in that window by just scraping.
Honest case for: a product selling trustworthy evidence shouldn't be built on data taken without asking. Honest case against: not one user has ever asked me where the data came from.
