The truth about costs known only to those who have tried to make it themselves
Reading Time: 8 minutes | January 2026
Key Summary
| Category | In-house Development (3 years) | Professional Service (3 years) |
|---|---|---|
| Total Cost | KRW 388 million | KRW 180 million |
| Savings | — | KRW 280 million (54%) |
If you operate three or more crawlers, the 8 minutes you spend reading this article can make a difference of millions of won annually.
"We can quickly make it with Python" — The expiration date of that statement is 2 weeks
Most companies develop crawlers themselves. The reason is simple. It's really easy at first.
Follow the Scrapy tutorial, parse with BeautifulSoup, handle dynamic pages with Selenium, and you're done. It usually takes 2 to 4 weeks to build.
But the success experience of those 2 weeks is a trap.
3 AM, a Slack notification rings
Tuesday, 3 AM. The developer in charge's phone rings.
"Crawler down. Data collection stopped."
Naver Shopping has changed its HTML structure again. You open your laptop and spend 2 hours modifying the code. Even though you have an important client meeting tomorrow morning.
This kind of thing repeats 2 to 3 times a month.
Just Naver Shopping alone changes its frontend structure dozens of times every year. If you add Coupang, 11th Street, various news sites, etc., crawler maintenance becomes an endless war.
And one day, that developer quits
What happens when the person who knows the crawler code best leaves?
Knowledge transfer, new hiring, code understanding, rebuilding. It's at least 3 months before normal data collection can resume.
If price monitoring stops for 3 months? If competitive analysis data is missing for 3 months? The data missed during those 3 months cannot be recovered. No matter how much money you spend later, you can't bring back past data.
Misconception about costs: "But we already have our own developers"
"Can't our developers do it without additional costs?" — This is the most expensive misconception.
The time allocated to the crawler is time taken away from other projects. Even if the senior developer's salary is already being paid, how much value would that person have added if they had worked on the core product instead of the crawler?
In-house Development: Visible Costs + Invisible Costs
| Item | Monthly Cost | Note |
|---|---|---|
| Senior Developer Salary | KRW 8-10 million | Dedicated or part-time for the crawler |
| Server Infrastructure | KRW 1-3 million | Includes proxy pool, monitoring |
| Proxy, CAPTCHA Bypass | KRW 500,000+ | Varies by site |
| Monthly Total | KRW 9.5-13.5 million | Visible costs only |
Invisible costs are added on top of this:
- Opportunity Cost: Senior focusing on the crawler instead of the core product → Product launch delay
- Burnout: Repeated urgent responses at dawn and on weekends → Increased risk of quitting
- Technical Debt: Accumulation of hastily fixed code → Full rewrite needed after 6 months
- Legal Risk: Violation of robots.txt, excessive requests → Potential legal disputes
Professional Service: Fixed Monthly Fee, No Additional Costs
| Item | Cost |
|---|---|
| Crawler Development | Included |
| Maintenance, Incident Response | Included |
| Site Structure Change Response | Included |
| Additional Crawler Requests | Included |
| 24/7 Monitoring | Included |
Compare. In-house development costs over KRW 9.5 million per month, while professional service costs KRW 5 million per month. This alone is a difference of over KRW 4.5 million per month.
3-year TCO: Numbers don't lie
Scenario of operating 5 crawlers for 3 years.
In-house Development
| Item | Annual | 3-year Total |
|---|---|---|
| Developer Salary | KRW 96 million | KRW 288.8 million |
| Infrastructure | KRW 24 million | KRW 72 million |
| Proxy, Others | KRW 6 million | KRW 18 million |
| Loss due to Incidents | KRW 3 million | KRW 10 million |
| Total | KRW 129 million | KRW 388.8 million |
Professional Service (Based on Hashscraper Subscription)
| Item | Annual | 3-year Total |
|---|---|---|
| Subscription Fee | KRW 60 million | KRW 180 million |
| Additional Costs | 0 | 0 |
| Total | KRW 60 million | KRW 180 million |
→ Savings over 3 years: KRW 280 million (54%)
As the number of crawlers increases, the gap widens. With in-house development, the maintenance burden increases with each additional crawler, while professional service includes additional crawlers in the subscription.
Breakeven Point: Faster than you think
| Number of Crawlers | In-house Development (3 years) | Professional Service (3 years) | Savings Rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | KRW 80 million | KRW 36 million | 55% |
| 3 | KRW 110 million | KRW 60 million | 45% |
| 5 | KRW 130 million | KRW 60 million | 54% |
| 10 | KRW 180 million | KRW 96 million | 47% |
Even with just one crawler, professional service is cost-effective.
You might think, "It's just one, why bother?" But if you calculate the hourly rate a developer spends on maintaining the crawler, it adds up. 40 hours per month × hourly rate of KRW 50,000 = KRW 2 million buried in the crawler. When you add infrastructure, proxies, incident response, the story changes.
Honestly: There are cases where in-house development is better
Professional service is not the answer in every situation:
- Simple, Small-scale: 1-2 crawlers, target site is simple and rarely changes its structure
- Expertise Available: In-house experienced crawler developer who can handle other tasks simultaneously
- Security Essential: Cannot entrust data to external sources due to regulations (about 5% of all inquiries)
However, if you need 3 or more crawlers, or 24/7 uninterrupted collection, in-house development is disadvantageous in terms of both cost and risk.
Why did 500 companies stop in-house development
Hashscraper currently provides data collection services to over 500 companies. Many of these companies are cases where they switched from in-house development.
| Industry | Key Use Cases | Number of Clients |
|---|---|---|
| E-commerce | Competitor price monitoring, product comparison | 180+ companies |
| Finance | Real-time news, disclosure collection | 100+ companies |
| Marketing | Social listening, keyword trends | 80+ companies |
| Real Estate | Property, price data collection | 50+ companies |
| HR | Recruitment market trend analysis | 40+ companies |
What changed before and after the switch
"We thought KRW 500,000 per month was expensive. But when we sorted out the personnel costs involved in in-house development, it was over KRW 1.2 million per month. Now that developer is creating new features in the product team."
— CTO of Company B in E-commerce"A senior developer spent 40 hours a month on crawler maintenance. After switching to Hashscraper and reallocating that time to the core product, our quarterly revenue increased by 30% in just 6 months."
— CEO of Company M in Marketing
Pricing Plans
| Plan | Monthly Fee | Concurrent Processing | Monthly Collection | Response Time | Suitable for Companies |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Basic | KRW 3 million | 1 | 300,000 items | 24 hours | Startups (5-20 employees) |
| Standard | KRW 5 million | 2 | 500,000 items | 24 hours | Small and medium-sized enterprises (20-100 employees) |
| Pro | KRW 8 million | 3 | 800,000 items | 12 hours | Mid-sized companies (100-500 employees) |
| Enterprise | KRW 12 million | 5 | 1.2 million items | 6 hours | Large companies (500+ employees) |
2 months free with a 1-year contract (equivalent to a 17% annual discount)
If you need small-scale projects or one-time collections, there is also a credit-based pricing plan.
Compare now
In a 30-minute free consultation, we will diagnose your current crawling environment and calculate the expected cost savings compared to in-house development. You can decide after the consultation.
Apply for a free consultation →
No preparation needed. Just let us know the sites you want to collect from.
Hashscraper — Receive data instead of making crawlers.
