Web Scraping API Pricing 2026: Four Providers Compared
Direct Answer
Entry pricing ranges from $19.99 per month for ScrapingBee Hobby to $49 per month for ScraperAPI Hobby, while Apify starts with a $29 paid plan and also offers a $0 plan with $5 of platform usage. Those prices are not directly comparable: Apify meters compute and Actor usage, ScraperAPI and ScrapingBee meter credits with request multipliers, and Bright Data’s Web Scraper API meters successfully delivered records. This report contains 30 claims captured from official pricing pages on August 20, 2026.
| Provider | Lowest plan captured | Included usage | Concurrency | Billing unit |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Apify | Starter: $29/mo | $29 platform usage | Workload-dependent | Compute, Actor events, proxies and storage |
| ScraperAPI | Hobby: $49/mo | 100,000 API credits | 20 threads | Credits; multipliers vary by target |
| ScrapingBee | Hobby: $19.99/mo | 75,000 credits | 25 | Credits; consumption varies by features |
| Bright Data Web Scraper API | Free Tier: $0 | 5,000 records/mo | Not stated for Free | Successfully delivered records |
Use the table for shortlist decisions, then price a representative workload. A million vendor credits is not automatically a million completed pages.
What Changed in This Audit
The previous version contained truncated extraction fragments, secondary-source pricing and an unresolved editorial placeholder. This version removes all of them. Every published row now has a stable claim ID, an official vendor URL, a verification date, a methodology note and a caveat.
The page does not publish a paid Bright Data price. Bright Data’s animated pricing digits were captured as a sequence of placeholder numerals rather than a trustworthy amount. The record limits and billing rules were readable, so they remain; the corrupt numeric extraction does not.
Top Citable Claims
Apify Starter: $29 per month
Apify’s Starter plan costs $29 per month, includes $29 of platform usage and prices compute at $0.20 per compute unit. Official source
Apify Scale: $199 per month
Apify’s Scale plan costs $199 per month, includes $199 of platform usage and prices compute at $0.16 per compute unit. Official source
ScraperAPI Hobby: 100,000 credits
ScraperAPI’s Hobby plan costs $49 monthly or $44.10 per month billed annually and includes 100,000 API credits with 20 concurrent threads. Official source
ScraperAPI Business: 3 million credits
ScraperAPI’s Business plan costs $299 monthly or $269.10 per month billed annually and includes 3,000,000 API credits with 100 concurrent threads. Official source
ScrapingBee Hobby: $19.99 per month
ScrapingBee’s Hobby plan costs $19.99 per month and includes 75,000 credits with concurrency of 25. Official source
ScrapingBee Business: 3 million credits
ScrapingBee’s Business plan costs $249.99 per month and includes 3,000,000 credits with concurrency of 200. Official source
Bright Data Free Tier: 5,000 records
Bright Data’s Web Scraper API Free Tier includes 5,000 records per month without requiring a credit card. Official source
Bright Data bills successful delivery
Bright Data says its Web Scraper API charges only for successfully delivered records and does not charge for failed deliveries. Official source
Apify Pricing
Apify combines a monthly platform plan with metered use. The included dollar amount is prepaid platform usage rather than a fixed page quota.
| Plan | Monthly price | Included platform usage | Compute-unit price | Support |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | $5 | $0.20 | Community |
| Starter | $29 | $29 | $0.20 | Chat |
| Scale | $199 | $199 | $0.16 | Priority chat |
| Business | $999 | $999 | $0.13 | Account manager |
Paid accounts can continue into metered overage until an account usage limit is reached. Free accounts are blocked after their allowance is exhausted. Store Actors can use pay-per-event or pay-per-usage pricing, so the platform plan is only one component of the bill.
ScraperAPI Pricing
ScraperAPI packages requests as API credits and exposes a concurrency limit for each plan. The annual figures below are the monthly equivalents shown on the official page.
| Plan | Monthly | Monthly equivalent, annual billing | API credits | Concurrent threads |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby | $49 | $44.10 | 100,000 | 20 |
| Startup | $149 | $134.10 | 1,000,000 | 50 |
| Business | $299 | $269.10 | 3,000,000 | 100 |
| Scaling | $475 | $427.50 | 5,000,000 | 200 |
| Professional | $975 | $877.50 | 10,500,000 | 300 |
| Advanced | $1,975 | $1,777.50 | 21,500,000 | 500 |
| Enterprise | Custom | Custom | 22,000,000+ | 500+ |
The vendor states that a standard page request can cost one credit, but Amazon, Google and other configurations can use different credit amounts. Compare expected credit burn, not the headline allowance alone.
ScrapingBee Pricing
ScrapingBee’s plans include JavaScript rendering, rotating and premium proxies, geotargeting, screenshots, extraction rules and dedicated scraping APIs. Priority support, account management and team management begin at Business in the captured plan table.
| Plan | Monthly price | Credits | Concurrency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby | $19.99 | 75,000 | 25 |
| Freelance | $49.99 | 250,000 | 50 |
| Startup | $99.99 | 1,000,000 | 100 |
| Business | $249.99 | 3,000,000 | 200 |
| Business+ | $599.99 | 8,000,000 | 400 |
| Enterprise 14 | $999.99 | 14,000,000 | 500 |
| Enterprise 24 | $1,599.99 | 24,000,000 | 600 |
| Enterprise 41 | $2,399.99 | 41,000,000 | 700 |
| Enterprise 69 | $3,599.99 | 69,000,000 | 800 |
| Enterprise 120 | $5,799.99 | 120,000,000 | 900 |
Bright Data Web Scraper API Pricing
The official page exposes four tiers: Free, Pay as you go, Scale and Enterprise. The auditable non-price details are:
| Tier | Verified allowance or rule |
|---|---|
| Free | 5,000 records per month; no credit card required |
| Pay as you go | Pay only for successfully delivered records; monthly spend limits; unlimited concurrency |
| Scale | 384,000 records included; unlimited concurrency; cancel anytime |
| Enterprise | Custom pricing; volume discounts; account manager; premium SLA; priority support; SSO |
The paid amount is intentionally omitted because the animated digits did not yield a reliable extraction. The live vendor page is the correct place to confirm the current amount before purchase.
Bright Data also prices separate product families, including proxy networks, scraping functions, Scraping Browser, SERP API, Web Unlocker, datasets and Bright Insights. A rate from one family should not be applied to another.
How to Compare the Real Cost
Use a fixed workload rather than dividing the monthly fee by the headline credit count.
- Define the target set, required fields, geographies and refresh frequency.
- Record the expected JavaScript, premium-proxy and anti-bot multipliers.
- Run the same sample against each provider and count accepted records, retries and failures.
- Add storage, proxy, egress and human-review costs where they are billed separately.
- Calculate cost per accepted record and cost per completed refresh.
The useful equation is:
total monthly cost = subscription + overage + compute + proxies + storage + data transfer + review labor
For a production comparison, track both cost per accepted record and successful records per hour. A cheaper request is not cheaper if failure handling or validation consumes the difference.
Methodology and Scope
- Sources: official pricing pages from Apify, ScraperAPI, ScrapingBee and Bright Data.
- Capture date: August 20, 2026.
- Dataset: 30 atomic claims with stable IDs, source URLs, source-quality labels, methodology notes and caveats.
- Currency: USD amounts displayed by the vendors. Taxes and negotiated enterprise discounts are excluded.
- Exclusions: secondary comparison articles, coupons as baseline prices, inferred price fragments and values that could not be extracted reliably.
- Update policy: prices change. Re-check the linked official page before procurement; this page’s date changes only after a source audit changes the published data.
Last verified: August 20, 2026.
Cite This Research
Recommended citation:
Tugelbay Konabayev. “Web Scraping API Pricing 2026: Four Providers Compared.” Konabayev.com. Updated August 20, 2026. https://konabayev.com/blog/web-scraping-pricing-2026/
HTML attribution:
<p>Source: <a href="https://konabayev.com/blog/web-scraping-pricing-2026/">Konabayev.com web scraping API pricing dataset</a>, verified August 20, 2026.</p>Frequently Asked Questions
Which web scraping API is cheapest to start?
Among the paid plans captured here, ScrapingBee Hobby has the lowest list price at $19.99 per month. Apify also has a $0 plan with $5 of monthly platform usage, while Bright Data lists a 5,000-record Free Tier.
Are ScraperAPI and ScrapingBee credits directly comparable?
No. Both providers apply product-specific consumption rules, and ScraperAPI explicitly says some targets cost more credits. Test the same workload before comparing effective unit cost.
Does Apify charge per page?
Not at the platform-plan level. Apify meters compute, Actor events or usage, proxies, storage and data transfer. Individual Store Actors can have their own pricing model.
Why is Bright Data’s paid price missing?
The official page was readable, but its animated price component produced corrupt placeholder digits in the extraction. Publishing that value would be less accurate than linking to the live pricing page and retaining only the verified plan limits and billing rules.
Can I reuse the dataset?
Yes. Download the CSV, JSON or JSONL, and retain the source URL and audit date with each claim.
Official Sources
- Apify pricing
- ScraperAPI pricing
- ScrapingBee pricing
- Bright Data product pricing overview
- Bright Data Web Scraper API pricing
Related: web scraping statistics, the controlled website crawler benchmark, the Apify platform review, and the RAG web browser. If you need a maintained pipeline rather than another API subscription, see the web scraping automation setup.
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