Developer builds affordable sports data scrapers for tennis, football and basketball

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A developer has released three sport-specific data scrapers on the Apify platform that return structured JSON results for tennis, football, and basketball matches without requiring an expensive sports data contract. The tools handle sport-specific scoring complexities, such as tennis tiebreak points, basketball quarter totals, and football penalty shootout scores, which commonly trip up naive scrapers. A key lesson shared was that inferring match status codes from sample data caused live matches to be misreported as cancelled, underscoring the need for authoritative enum definitions. Each scraper costs $0.001 per match, meaning a full day of roughly 1,700 global football fixtures costs under two dollars. The project is aimed at developers building models, scoreboards, or fantasy tools who need reliable structured data at low cost.

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