Was permission-first worth four months?

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.

Anyone here gone the slow route on data sourcing? Did it ever actually pay off?

(Building Niched, for context.)