Kimono labs, free web scraping tool used by 125k developers, data scientists and businesses, got acquired by Palantir. According to a message on their website, they won’t continue providing the publicly available cloud hosted kimono product. They are going to shut down the service by 2/29/2016.
What does it mean to developers and businesses using the product?
Obviously, they have to look for alternatives due to the discontinued service. Let’s assume you want to consider hosted tool similar to Kimono.
Think about the risks involved in choosing a free hosted web scraping tool:
Risk 1: In the event of an acquisition or shut down, they are not going to share the proprietary technology. Your business will be in jeopardy if it is powered by the data from a hosted web scraping service.
Risk 2: The process is never smooth when you switch to a new service provider. The cost can go
up significantly and the switching can affect the performance of your app.
Risk 3: Imagine you were collecting data from xyz.com which is critical for your business.
One fine day the feed stopped coming and you realize the free tool can’t deal with the
updated version of the site. You can’t demand a solution because you haven’t paid them
anything.
We welcome you to try Datahut services. Our service is built to eliminate the three risk factors stated above.
Here are some good reasons to consider a full-service provider like Datahut:
We use open source technology and share it with our clients.
We will charge you a reasonable rate with a standard service level agreement.
You have paid us and we are obliged to serve you. We are always an email away if you need help.
Give it a good look through when you are hiring a web scraping service provider. Here is a blog post we wrote to help you find the right web scraping service – Ask These 8 Questions To Hire The Right One.
Thanks for reading this blog post. Datahut offers affordable data extraction services (DaaS).
If you need help with your web scraping projects, let us know and we will be glad to help.