Comment by wruza

And why is it? A company provides you an API for a "fee" and a free web-based interface, as long as you are agile enough to use it, with some limitations per ip/cookie. You choose the second path and automate it. What's wrong with that? Limits of the free access are the public contract. You're not obliged to play along with someone's "monetary spirit".

And in practice, APIs are often much more PITA than the actual interface, but you can't buy unlimited web automation. Few years ago one of my projects literally OCRed data from an android phone screen because receiving it via API took a couple minutes longer and involved email-like back and forth with polling and id matching after a convoluted authentication that fails every few requests.