The part that broke first for me was pricing and refund policy, not the tech. I ran a smaller version of this, foreclosure pre-filings in two Ohio counties, sold leads via a simple CSV drip to about eleven buyers over eight months in 2022. The buyers were fine until one of them had a bad address batch and I gave a partial refund to keep the relationship, and then two more asked for the same thing the next month on leads that were not actually bad, just unconverted. No contract language, no dispute process, nothing. I spent more time on those three conversations than I did on the scraper that whole quarter. If you are solo and time-constrained, buyer management will eat your protected hours faster than any technical failure because there is no clean handoff, it is always you.
On the cost side, people keep throwing around numbers like $200 to $400 a month to run something like this lean. In Ohio in 2022 that was closer to $600 to $700 once you factor in a court data API that was actually reliable, I tried scraping direct and the county sites blocked me inside of six weeks, plus a throwaway CRM to track who got what batch and when, and occasional manual pulls when the automation missed a filing type. That is before your time. Six to eight hours a week will hold the thing together in month two and three but by month five you are either growing the buyer list or you are stagnant, and growing it requires sales time you do not have. I ended up killing mine not because it was unprofitable but because the W2 week would go sideways, I manage leasing operations too so nothing is ever predictable, and I would surface three days later to a backlog that made the data stale before it shipped.
