ScrapingBee Alternatives: Scraping APIs Compared by Credit Cost

ScrapingBee publishes five plans. Credits and concurrency scale together, so a bigger plan buys you both more volume and more parallel requests.

Source: scrapingbee.com/pricing, September 2026. Sign-up includes 1,000 free credits with no card.

Now the part that decides your bill. ScrapingBee's documentation prices each request by the proxy pool and rendering mode you choose: 1 credit with render_js=false, 5 with rendering (the default), 10 for a premium proxy without rendering, 25 for a premium proxy with rendering, and 75 for the stealth proxy pool, which only works with rendering on. Multiply those rungs by the per-credit price and you get what a page actually costs:

Arithmetic on the published list prices, assuming you use every credit you pay for.

Read across the rows and the spread is 75x between the cheapest and the most expensive page on the same plan. Read down a column and you see that moving from Freelance to Business + cuts cost per credit by about 62%. Both levers matter more than which vendor's logo is on the invoice.

None of these are hidden. They are documented. They are also the settings most people never change after the quick start works.

1. Rendering is on unless you turn it off

ScrapingBee's docs state that by default it fetches the URL through a headless browser that executes JavaScript. That makes the default request a 5-credit request. For a server-rendered product page, a sitemap or a JSON endpoint, you pay five times what the page needs. Test each target domain once with render_js=false and compare the HTML. If the data is there, keep the flag off for that domain forever. Our guide to scraping dynamic JavaScript websites shows quick ways to tell whether a page actually needs a browser.

2. The timeout holds a concurrency slot for up to 140 seconds

The documented default timeout is 140,000 ms. A request stuck on a slow or hostile target occupies one of your concurrent slots for that entire time. On Hobby, with 25 slots, a handful of hung requests can halve your throughput, and teams then upgrade a plan to buy concurrency they already had. Set an explicit timeout that fits the target and retry on your side. Proxy timeouts and retry logic covers sensible values.

3. Escalating to stealth for everything

Stealth at 75 credits is the right tool for a handful of heavily protected domains and a very expensive habit everywhere else. Rather than turn it on globally after one block, escalate per domain: plain, then rendered, then premium, then stealth, and record which rung each domain needs. ScrapingBee's own Auto-Mode does a version of this, and its docs say a request costs 0 credits if every configuration fails.

An illustrative workload, not a measurement: 250,000 pages a month made up of 80% static pages that parse fine without a browser, 18% that need rendering, and 2% that need a premium proxy with rendering.

Same pages, same data, $150 a month apart, and that is before retries. Anyone shopping for an alternative with the second configuration will find that every alternative looks cheaper, because they will set their flags correctly while testing the new vendor. Fix the flag first, then compare.

Scraping APIs price in three different units, and the unit matters more than the rate.

The split that matters: ScraperAPI and Zyte price by the target, while ScrapingBee, ZenRows and SparkProxy price by the flags you send. Target-based pricing is easier to predict per domain but you cannot lower it by being clever. Flag-based pricing rewards teams who tune per domain and punishes teams who do not.

Zyte API: when hard targets dominate the bill

Zyte prices per 1,000 successful responses across five difficulty tiers. Its pricing page lists HTTP responses at $0.13 to $1.27 per 1,000 on pay as you go, falling to $0.06 to $0.61 with a $500 monthly commitment, and browser-rendered responses at $1.01 to $16.08 per 1,000 on pay as you go, $0.48 to $7.68 at the $500 commitment. New accounts get $5 of free credit.

Compare that with the ScrapingBee table. A protected page that needs stealth costs $5.62 to $14.70 per 1,000 on ScrapingBee depending on plan. If Zyte rates that domain in a middle tier, it is cheaper. If Zyte rates it Advanced, it may not be. Zyte's model also means you never pay for a failure, which matters most on exactly the targets where failures are common. The catch is predictability: you do not choose the tier, so run your real domains through the $5 credit before you model a budget.

Scrapfly: similar shape, lower concurrency per dollar

Scrapfly publishes Discovery ($30, 200,000 credits, 5 concurrent), Pro ($100, 1,000,000, 20), Startup ($250, 2,500,000, 50) and Enterprise ($500, 5,500,000, 100), plus 1,000 free credits. Credit multipliers for rendering, its anti-scraping mode and residential proxies are calculated in an estimator on the pricing page rather than printed as a fixed table, so price your own feature mix there. On raw numbers, $100 buys 1M credits on both Scrapfly Pro and ScrapingBee Startup, but ScrapingBee gives 100 concurrent requests against Scrapfly's 20. If throughput matters, that difference outweighs the rest.

ScraperAPI: when your targets fit its domain categories

ScraperAPI's cost per request depends on which category the target falls into as well as your parameters, and it does not meter geotargeting. That suits teams scraping many ordinary domains across countries and hurts teams focused on search results. We covered how to profile your URLs against its categories in ScraperAPI alternatives, and the two are compared head to head in ZenRows vs ScraperAPI.

ZenRows: when you want auto-parsing

ZenRows sells a similar flag-based credit model with rendering and premium proxy multipliers, and adds automatic parsing for common page types plus a remote browser product. If you are leaving ScrapingBee because you are tired of writing extraction rules, it is worth a trial. The ZenRows alternatives post covers where it falls short.

Oxylabs and Bright Data unblocker products

Both sell unblocking endpoints that behave like a proxy you point your own client at, with pricing tied to successful requests or volume bands rather than a credit ladder. They fit best when legal review requires an enterprise vendor, or when you want unblocking without adopting a new request format. Their rates and minimums vary by product and commitment, so compare their current pages directly against your per-1,000-page numbers from the table above.

Disclosure first: this is our product, so weigh this section accordingly.

Our API plans line up with ScrapingBee's upper four tiers almost exactly: Starter $49 for 250,000 credits and 50 concurrent, Growth $99 for 1,000,000 and 100, Pro $249 for 3,000,000 and 200, Scale $599 for 8,000,000 and 400. There is no $19 tier. A plain fetch is 1 credit, a rendered page is 5, a screenshot or PDF is 10. So switching from ScrapingBee to us is not a price move for most workloads. If someone tells you otherwise, check the arithmetic.

The differences that might matter to you:

• Output formats. format accepts html, md, mdx, json, screenshot or pdf, so pipelines that feed LLMs or search indexes can take Markdown directly instead of cleaning HTML.
• Failed requests are refunded automatically, per our docs, rather than only on an all-configurations-failed path.
• Add-ons are priced flat. Country targeting, js_scenario, stealth and screenshot each add 5 credits. On ScrapingBee, stealth is its own 75-credit pool. These are not equivalent products, so test protected domains on both rather than comparing the numbers.
• Where we are weaker. Our own proxy network is datacenter, and ScrapingBee has years of tuning on its premium and stealth pools. For a domain that only passes on ScrapingBee stealth, assume we need to prove ourselves on your trial credits.

A plain request that reports its own cost:

import requests

r = requests.get(
    "https://scrape.sparkproxy.io/api/v1",
    headers={"X-API-Key": "YOUR_API_KEY"},
    params={
        "url": "https://www.sparkproxy.io/pricing",
        "render_js": "false",   # 1 credit instead of 5
        "format": "md",
    },
    timeout=60,
)
print(r.status_code, r.headers.get("X-Credits-Used"), r.headers.get("X-Duration-Ms"))
print(r.text[:500])

A scraping API is a bundle: proxies, a browser farm, retries and unblocking. If your credit log shows most spend on plain 1-credit fetches, you are paying a markup for parts of the bundle you do not use.

Illustrative comparison, list prices only. ScrapingBee Business + at $599 buys 8,000,000 credits, which is 8 million plain fetches at best. A SparkProxy Boost datacenter plan at $240 a month gives you 500 concurrent threads with unlimited bandwidth and no per-request meter. If an average plain request takes one second end to end, 500 threads could in principle issue far more than 8 million requests in a month. Your real ceiling is whatever rate the targets tolerate, not the plan.

What you give up is everything the API did for you: retries, header management, rendering and block detection. That is engineering time, and it is the real price. Web scraping API vs self-managed proxies walks through that trade-off. A common middle ground is to route static domains through proxies and keep an API plan, one tier smaller, for the rendered and protected ones.

# Rotating datacenter exit on the proxy gateway, one request
curl -x http://USERNAME:PASSWORD@gateway.sparkproxy.io:11000 https://www.sparkproxy.io/ -o page.html

The parameter names across flag-based APIs are close enough that most migrations are a wrapper change. ScrapingBee's render_js, premium_proxy, country_code, wait_for, js_scenario and extract_rules all have same-named parameters in our API, while a ScrapingBee screenshot=true becomes format=screenshot. Zyte and ScraperAPI use different request shapes, so plan on real code changes there.

Run this sequence before cancelling anything:

1. Export 30 days of request logs and group spend by domain and credit rung.
2. Fix flags on your current vendor first (rendering off where possible, explicit timeouts).
3. Re-cost the month. This is your true baseline.
4. Send the same 500 to 1,000 URLs per domain through each shortlisted vendor's free credits, recording success rate and cost per successful page.
5. Move domains one at a time, starting with the cheapest rung, and keep both vendors running for a billing cycle.

Step 2 ends a surprising number of migrations. That is a good outcome.

Stay if your volume fits Hobby or Freelance and you value the documentation, if several of your key targets only pass on its stealth pool, or if your code relies on its dedicated Google Search endpoint and extraction features. A team at 200 concurrent requests on Business that has already tuned flags per domain is usually paying a fair market rate, and the alternatives in this list will cost about the same once measured honestly.