By Vitalii Oren
4/6/2025
HTML Parsing Budget before and after AI Agents

The Hidden Costs of In-House Parsing
Recently, I spoke with a company where web scraping and parsing are critical to their marketing data intelligence business. We discussed their experience maintaining the entire parsing operation and explored ways to scaleāespecially when it comes to HTML parsing.
š Key Pain Points
- Constantly Breaking Parsers ā Scripts fail unpredictably, creating a never-ending backlog of fixes.
- Maintenance Despair ā The team spends more time fixing broken scripts than building new ones.
- Resource Drain ā Staying afloat means hiring more people just to keep up with maintenance.
- Outsourcing Falls Short ā External developers help, but often deliver low-quality, unsustainable scripts.
- High Management Overhead ā Engineering managers waste 1ā2 days per week just overseeing parser-related tasks.
- Scalability Roadblock ā More growth means more parsers to maintaināmaking scaling an uphill battle leaving no room for innovation.
After doing my calculations, I was triple-shocked:
- 1ļøā£ First, when I realized the budget they spent to build all their parsers from scratch.
- 2ļøā£ Second, by their ongoing maintenance cost they pay every single year just to keep things running.
- 3ļøā£ Third, regarding the potential savings they missed by not starting with Parsera (if only we'd existed then).

The Costs Breakdown
šļø Scale
- Company parses 50,000 - 100,000 HTML pages
- 1,000 active parsers
- 4-8 hours to build one parser
- Every parser requires 1-2 days per year to maintain
- 1 day per week is spent on management
šµ Costs
- With 1,000 parsers, this translates to nearly 1,000 days of maintenance annually.
- To mitigate this, the company has outsourced some of the work, hiring developers at rates ranging from $15 to $30 per hour.
- Their parsing-related salaries aloneĀ cost $300,000 - $500,000 per year.
- Another $200,000 - $300,000Ā wasĀ needed to build those parsers.
- The value of the time invested in this process is impossible to calculate accurately.
The Way Out
The company has begun testing new parsing technologies to reduce reliance on custom scripts, automate scraper generation, and minimize ongoing maintenance. Thatās when they found ParseraĀ andĀ discoveredĀ itsĀ HTML Parsing Agents. TheyĀ ran a fewĀ tests onĀ aĀ small scaleĀ and cameĀ to several conclusions,Ā which are describedĀ in the following table:
š¦ | In-House Parsing | HTML Parsing by Parsera |
---|---|---|
Time to Market | Depends on development cycle | Depends on decision cycle |
Scalability | Depends on hiring speed | Depends on business needs |
Launch Time | 1 parser = 1 engineer + 4ā8 hours | 1 agent = anyone + just 5 mins |
Maintenance Time | 1 parser = 1 engineer + 8ā16 hours/yr | 0 |
Management Time | Weekly: 8 hours | 0 |
If you felt any resemblance reading this article, we invite you to test our solutions and check the difference Parsera could make for you.