I’ve never bought one, but I reckon a small one might do the trick for me – it just needs to keep the scraper running. Or perhaps a better solution would be a service like a cron job.
In short, I need a service that’s always online and keeps the scraper running smoothly. Unfortunately, Termux drains my smartphone’s battery.

Thanks so much for the advice!
I’ll have a look at the various suggestions out there.
The alternative would be to buy another Raspberry Pi and set up the cron job, or to wrap up the project and hand it over to someone who can keep it going
I’ve got plenty of time, though.
The data I’ve collected has already been backed up, so it’s probably safe xD

I don't think free VPS is a good long term option, but there is always Oracle Cloud, AWS, micr0s0ft azure and similar services.
As far as I know they ask for some kind of registration and credit card identification even if you are using free tier.
Only free VPNS without asking for card info are vpswala and GratisVPS, but their service is questionable.
There are plenty of other no-kyc VPS services you can buy and pay with bitcoin, monero and other coins:
https://kycnot.me/?categories=vps

What offers did you find? Racknerd used to start from $10.60 per year (last Black Friday), but now it starts from $21.99. So far my existing servers haven't been increased in price.

I’d found deals starting at $5, but they were monthly payments, so more than $60 a year – and in any case, for a VPS with poor performance. I’m not sure whether it’s good value or not.

$22 is definitely cheaper, and I’ll bear that in mind


I don’t doubt that my extension has earned me Merit and helped me rise through the ranks, but I doubt that’s the only reason I now hold a high rank.
Furthermore, I don’t agree that just because I’m part of a petition campaign, I should have to pay for the server I need for my tool.
The petition campaign pays me for other reasons – certainly not for my BRDb; the same goes for my employer – they pay me for my work, not for BRDb.
But none of this means I’m obliged to buy a VPS; I’ve made the tool freely available to everyone – I don’t pay and I’m not paid – but if I have to pay without receiving any financial return, then I’d rather look for a free solution; if that doesn’t exist, I’ll find an alternative way.

Hey mate, never give up!
You’ve always managed to find a solution or an alternative, so you’ll pull it off this time too.
Follow the advice you’ve been given – I’d say it’s very valuable – and make up your own mind.
It’d be a shame if you decided to shut down the project, because so many people are using it all the time now

It’s a good idea – a stroke of genius! But I think it’s impossible to put into practice, as the tool doesn’t check whether a post was deserved or not; it only checks the number of posts written and the Merit points received.
So deleting posts – assuming it’s even possible – would work to increase your score, but a moderator would have to delete your posts; I don’t think you can do it yourself.

I know it’s possible to delete a post in a thread yourself, but I’m not sure whether deleting a post also changes the post counter.
Let me try to explain this clearly: suppose I’ve written 1001 posts, for example. With this post, the counter goes from 1001 to 1002, but then I delete three from old threads – does the counter stay at 1002 or drop to 999?
If the counter updates and recalculates the total to 999, does that mean the brdb score could be manipulated!

OK, so that means you can manipulate the BRDb score.
But it wouldn’t make sense to delete posts that haven’t received any Merit just to boost the score, as many posts are interesting even if they haven’t received any Merit! There are plenty of them on the forum.

I’d never checked this possibility before; thank you for pointing it out.
So there are already cases where some users have deleted their posts, and indeed the score is high because the posts are deleted but the Merit points remain.
Theymos should also delete the Merit points if a user deletes their post; otherwise, the count would be seriously skewed.
Thank you very much for pointing this out.