We use scrapers to wrap and combine 3rd party tools and increase the usability and decrease amount of work required to get something done.
Sometimes to do some task at a 3rd party tool, it requires many clicks and page loads. My scraper wrapping the tool automates most of the task and only keeps the manual task, reducing the amount of required clicks (and time) required to get the task done.
I use a mix of headless browsers (for JS-heavy apps) and raw API calls. Sometimes I even use the browser to login, trigger a single sample APi call, extract all headers and content, close the browser, and re-run that api call directly using a HTTP lib. The request body obviously gets modified on the user’s requirements. We’re bypassing the slow login process as long as the session is valid. We’re also sharing sessions/logins/accounts this way without exposing credentials to users.
It can also be done to bypass the only-one-session-per-user systems. This is done with permission from 3rd parties. They’re fine with it, they just didn’t want to provide a proper API or let us bypass the only-one-session rule because it requires code changes they’re not willing to make only for us.
Sometimes the tool breaks when the html
Or api changes but it usually only takes a few minutes to modify the code to fix it.