Viability Test

Analyze sites before scraping to find the best strategy. Tests each URL with multiple scraping modes and reports what works.

Basic usage

test = client.create_viability_test(
    ["https://example.com", "https://hard-site.com"],
    depth="full",
)

import time
while True:
    result = client.get_viability_test(test.run_id)
    if result.status == "completed":
        break
    time.sleep(2)

for r in result.results:
    print(f"{r.url}: {r.recommended_strategy}")
    print(f"  Difficulty: {r.difficulty}")
    print(f"  Best mode: {r.best_mode}")
    print(f"  Browser needed: {r.javascript_required}")

Depth levels

Control how many modes are tested:

Depth	Modes tested	Credits per URL
"quick"	Simple HTTP only	~1
"standard"	Simple + proxy + browser	up to 7
"full" (default)	All modes including browser+proxy	up to 12

# Quick check — just test simple HTTP
test = client.create_viability_test(urls, depth="quick")

# Full analysis — test every mode
test = client.create_viability_test(urls, depth="full")

Per-mode results

The modes_tested dict shows results for each scraping mode:

for r in result.results:
    if r.modes_tested:
        for mode, data in r.modes_tested.items():
            status = "OK" if data.success else "BLOCKED"
            print(f"  {mode}: {status} ({data.time_ms}ms, {data.credits} credits)")
            if data.captcha_type:
                print(f"    CAPTCHA: {data.captcha_type}")

Key result fields

Field	Description
difficulty	"easy", "medium", or "hard"
best_mode	Cheapest mode that worked (e.g. "simple", "browser_proxy")
recommended_strategy	Suggested scraping approach
suggested_params	Dict of params to use with client.scrape()
modes_tested	Dict of mode name to ViabilityModeResult
total_credits_used	Credits consumed across all mode tests
captcha_detected	Whether CAPTCHA was found
captcha_providers	List of protection providers
javascript_required	Whether browser rendering is needed
cloudflare_level	Cloudflare protection level