Fine, but you have the invest in the CPU to determine if the payment was made. That's a cost on you, not the scraper. If the scraper bangs on that payment door 1000x you've spent a fair chunk of CPU looking for valid cookies, query the redis/valkey and DB to manage payment auth.

You're not wrong, it is time the scraper pays, but you're going to have to fund it still.

I don't claim to have a better answer.

I want a perfect solution that is free, putting pages up used to be free, now it isn't.