These sorts of 'grey market' APIs already have a lot of infrastructure support too. Paid APIs haven't been the push, but people have wanted programmatic access to other peoples' site data for a while now. The real driver has just been "no API", not "pricey API".
Is there an industry term for non-official APIs? I often find myself wondering if a third-party service already exists around some aspect of a platform's "crown jewels", but don't really know how to search for them.
Not that I know of, I just know that there's an ecosystem of bespoke site wrappers that people will pay for, and some folks who are quite good at it. Kind of grey hat stuff and it's been a few years since I was in contact with the scene, if you could call it that.
Downloading a webpage and returning a snippet of it via API isn't greyhat work, just like building a search engine isn't greyhat work. Processing public websites is white hat work, and very common too! If a business wants to restrict access, they can take down their website.
Any company that has anything valuable that anyone else would want is going to put TOS there prohibiting scraping, making it grey hat and legally risky.
