Guides · Updated October 2026

Managed Recurring Web Data Feeds: A Buyer's Guide

A recurring data feed is web scraping as a utility: fresh, validated data arriving on schedule — daily, weekly, monthly — with someone else responsible for keeping it flowing. This guide covers how feeds work, what they should cost, and what to demand from a vendor.

Feed vs. one-time dataset

A one-time scrape answers a question; a feed powers a process — price monitoring, inventory tracking, lead generation, market surveillance, AI retrieval. The engineering difference is bigger than it looks. A one-time scrape only has to work once. A feed has to survive the source website redesigning itself, adding anti-bot protection, or changing its data structure, none of which arrive with advance notice. Most of a feed's cost is this ongoing adaptation, not the initial build.

What a managed feed includes

• Collection infrastructure — servers, proxies, scheduling — owned and run by the vendor
• Monitoring — every run watched; failures caught by the vendor, not discovered by you in a broken dashboard
• Validation — record counts, field completeness, anomaly checks before delivery, because a feed that silently degrades is worse than one that visibly breaks
• Maintenance — collectors repaired when sources change, included in the price rather than billed as surprise hours
• Delivery — CSV, Excel, JSON to your inbox, SFTP, S3, or straight into your database

What feeds cost

Market-wide, managed feeds run from a few hundred dollars per month for a single lightly-protected source to five figures monthly for many sources, high frequency, or heavily defended sites. The main cost drivers are the number of sources, collection frequency, protection level of the targets, and validation depth. Beware per-record pricing on data whose volume you can't predict, and hourly pricing on maintenance — both shift risk onto you. Fixed monthly pricing per feed keeps the vendor's incentives aligned with yours. (Marquee Data prices fixed, never hourly.)

Eight questions to ask any feed vendor

1. What happens when the source site changes — who notices, how fast is the fix, is it included?
2. What validation runs before I receive data?
3. What's your track record on sources with anti-bot protection?
4. Do I get records, or do I get an SLA on completeness and freshness?
5. Is pricing fixed or metered?
6. Who owns the collection code and infrastructure?
7. What do you collect — public pages only?
8. Can I see a sample before committing?

When to run it in-house instead

If the source is stable and unprotected, volume is modest, and you have an engineer with slack time, an in-house feed with modern tooling is reasonable — AI coding assistants have made the initial build genuinely fast. The calculation changes when the feed matters commercially: the question stops being "can we build it" and becomes "who notices at 2 a.m. when it stops," and that is an operations commitment, not a coding task. Marquee Data has run recurring feeds for clients — including Fortune 500 companies and hedge funds — since 2017.

← All guides · Web Scraping 101: the complete guide