Most advice about scraping protected sites jumps straight to tactics: rotate this, spoof that, add a solver. That skips the more useful question. On a heavily defended site, the hard part is often not getting the data. It is getting it for less than it is worth. Cheaper proxies did not make scraping cheaper Proxy bandwidth and infrastructure have become more affordable, yet the cost of one successful request keeps rising. The cycle is simple. Cheaper access brings more scrape