We've yanked like dozens of pipelines off the .json endpoint, and tbh there's some stuff that doesn't get talked about enough. The sneaky part that got people was the silent failures - way worse than just getting a 403 and knowing something's broken. Instead teams were getting http 200s back with redirect html or straight-up empty json, so the pipeline looked like it ran fine, data got processed, but then you'd check the database and.. nothing. A lot of folks running older scripts without proper payload validation didn't catch this for days, which is a nightmare. Then there's the TLS fingerprinting thing - people sleep on this way too hard. Sure, switching from requests to httpx or curl with custom ciphers helps, but residential proxies are basically mandatory now if you're doing any serious volume. Datacenter IPs get nuked on sight, even if your headers are absolutely perfect. On the managed API side, we ended up going with Crawlora for one client because their OAuth approval was stuck in bureaucracy hell for weeks, and it actually paid off - the normalized output cut our parsing work in half, and the pay-per-request pricing was way cleaner than locking into some enterprise tier with wild unpredictable volume. Last thing, reddit's already eyeing RSS feeds as the next thing to kill. If your team's using feeds as a backup plan, start thinking about what's next now - don't get caught sleeping on that one
We've yanked like dozens of pipelines off the .json endpoint, and tbh there's some stuff that doesn't get talked about enough. The sneaky part that got people was the silent failures - way worse than just getting a 403 and knowing something's broken. Instead teams were getting http 200s back with redirect html or straight-up empty json, so the pipeline looked like it ran fine, data got processed, but then you'd check the database and.. nothing. A lot of folks running older scripts without proper payload validation didn't catch this for days, which is a nightmare. Then there's the TLS fingerprinting thing - people sleep on this way too hard. Sure, switching from requests to httpx or curl with custom ciphers helps, but residential proxies are basically mandatory now if you're doing any serious volume. Datacenter IPs get nuked on sight, even if your headers are absolutely perfect. On the managed API side, we ended up going with Crawlora for one client because their OAuth approval was stuck in bureaucracy hell for weeks, and it actually paid off - the normalized output cut our parsing work in half, and the pay-per-request pricing was way cleaner than locking into some enterprise tier with wild unpredictable volume. Last thing, reddit's already eyeing RSS feeds as the next thing to kill. If your team's using feeds as a backup plan, start thinking about what's next now - don't get caught sleeping on that one