There's a project called woob (https://woob.tech/) that implements python scripts that are a little bit like scrapers but only 'scrape' on demand from requests from console & desktop programs.

How much of this article do you think would apply to something like that? e.g. something like 'wait a second (or even two!) between successive hits' might not be necessary (one could perhaps shorten it to 1/4 second) if one is only doing a few requests followed by long periods of no requests.