Scrapoxy – End of Life

After more than eleven years, I'm discontinuing Scrapoxy. The first commit dates back to August 31, 2015, and the first public demo followed a week later at HumanTalks Paris. It's been a long run.

I want to thank everyone who used Scrapoxy over the years, and especially those who contributed to it. This project led to great conversations, talks in more than fifteen countries, and a tool that genuinely helped teams operate web scraping at scale. I'm proud of what it became.

What happened

Scrapoxy started as a personal open-source project. Over time, it grew into production-critical infrastructure for many companies. With that growth came ongoing demands: feature requests, user support, operational responsibility, and recurring infrastructure costs.

Running Scrapoxy was never just about maintaining code. The fingerprinting infrastructure, GeoIP services, proxy validation layers, and monitoring all incurred real, recurring expenses. For years, those costs were fully covered out of pocket.

When it became clear that this was no longer sustainable as a side project, I introduced paid enterprise support. Later, I restricted the source code after parts of the project were reused verbatim by commercial products, while Scrapoxy itself remained free to use. Only support and dedicated infrastructure were paid.

The outcome was simple: very few users were willing to pay. Despite Scrapoxy being used in production and embedded in critical pipelines, most companies treated it as free infrastructure they could depend on indefinitely. If you've seen that XKCD comic about all of modern digital infrastructure depending on a project maintained by one person, that was Scrapoxy.

This is not an accusation. It is a common structural reality of open source when a single maintainer also bears recurring operational costs. I can no longer subsidize infrastructure and support under those conditions.

What's next

I'm moving on to other projects and opportunities. This is not a pause, a transition, or a handoff. Scrapoxy is being discontinued.

For existing enterprise support subscribers, nothing changes until the end of your contract. You will continue to have access to your dedicated version, including its fingerprinting infrastructure, and will receive support under the same terms.

For everyone else, you should plan to migrate. Docker images have been removed from public registries, public documentation has been taken offline, and shared fingerprinting infrastructure has been shut down for non-paying users. A separate Q&A details the operational implications.

There is no community takeover planned, no new maintainer, and no replacement service provided by me.

Thank you to everyone who used, discussed, improved, or supported Scrapoxy over the years. I wish you the best going forward.

Fabien, February 6, 2026