Web Scraping API Pricing 2026: Four Providers Compared

Direct Answer

Apify Starter and ScrapingBee Hobby both list $19 per month, while ScraperAPI Hobby lists $49 per month. All four providers also offer a free allowance. Those prices are not directly comparable: Apify meters compute and Actor usage, ScraperAPI meters target-dependent credits, ScrapingBee publishes credit allowances without consumption rules in this capture, and Bright Data’s Web Scraper API meters successfully delivered records. This report contains 28 source-backed claims captured from official pricing pages on October 2, 2026.

Use the table for shortlist decisions, then price a representative workload. A million vendor credits is not automatically a million completed pages.

Downloads: CSV · JSON · JSONL

What Changed in This Audit

The October 2 source audit found Apify Starter listed at $19 rather than the previous $29, and ScrapingBee’s five public plans listed at whole-dollar prices rather than the previous .99 amounts. ScraperAPI’s captured plan prices, credits and concurrency remain unchanged. These are differences between our source captures, not dated vendor price-change announcements.

ScrapingBee’s five extended Enterprise rows were absent from the current public table, so they have been retired from the current dataset. Their claim IDs (021–025) are not reused; the August research snapshot is retained in our source archive. The current dataset contains 28 claims with official URLs, audit dates and caveats. Three new claims cover Bright Data PAYG terms, ScrapingBee free credits and Bright Data’s included billing components. Public JSON records the retired IDs and their reason.

The October 2 capture still does not provide a reliable 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: $19 per month

Apify’s Starter plan costs $19 per month, includes $19 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 per month

ScrapingBee’s Hobby plan costs $19 per month and includes 75,000 credits with concurrency of 25. Official source

ScrapingBee Business: 3 million credits

ScrapingBee’s Business plan costs $249 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.

The pricing FAQ says usage above the prepaid allowance is added to the next invoice. Free accounts are blocked after their allowance is exhausted until the next monthly cycle.

Rented Actor costs are deducted from prepaid usage on paid plans; proxies, storage and transfer can also consume usage. Add only costs billed outside the plan’s included usage.

The annual-billing toggle advertises a 10% discount; this capture does not provide separate annual-plan amounts. Apify also offers an Enterprise quote with custom resource and support terms.

The current table lists maximum concurrent Actor runs of 5 on Free, 32 on Starter, 128 on Scale and 256 on Business. These are Actor-run limits, not equivalent to another provider’s concurrent HTTP requests.

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.

ScraperAPI also offers a free account with 1,000 API credits and at most 5 concurrent connections. The capture does not state the free allowance’s renewal cadence. Hobby and Startup geotargeting is limited to the US and EU; Business and higher list Global geotargeting. Exceeding concurrent threads returns 429 without an extra charge; requests are rejected rather than queued. Enterprise discounts exclude Ultra Premium requests, which have their own minimum rate.

The current FAQ lists a standard page at 1 credit, Amazon at 5, Google and Bing (including subdomains) at 25, and LinkedIn at 30. It also says bypassing bot protections such as Cloudflare, DataDome or PerimeterX adds 10 credits per request. Use the dashboard Domain Cost Estimator and set max_cost for a per-request budget; do not assume these entries cover every configuration.

For example, 100,000 Hobby credits cover at most 4,000 requests priced at 25 credits each, before additional modifiers. This is allowance arithmetic, not a measured count of accepted records. Unused credits do not roll over. PAYG beyond the allowance is available on Scaling, Professional, Advanced and Enterprise; the FAQ directs lower tiers to upgrade or contact support.

Evaluate ScraperAPI on your own targets: Explore ScraperAPI’s scraping API if you want to call an API from your existing collector. Run the same sample of permitted public URLs, validate returned fields and record total credits per accepted result before choosing a plan. This affiliate link was checked on October 1, 2026; the pricing table above was rechecked on October 2, 2026.

ScrapingBee Pricing

ScrapingBee’s pricing matrix lists JavaScript rendering, rotating and premium proxies, geotargeting, screenshots, extraction rules, dedicated APIs, priority support and account management. The capture does not preserve per-plan availability marks or request-credit consumption rules, so these feature headings are not treated as entitlements for every plan.

Prices exclude VAT. The page offers 1,000 free API credits without requiring a credit card; the capture does not establish a recurring free allowance. For more credits or concurrency, it now directs readers to a product expert rather than publishing the extended tiers from our August capture.

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:

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.

The Web Scraper API calculator says proxies, unblocking and parsing are included in the bill, and lists compute/runtime units as included. Do not add those components a second time. The Free card says records while nearby copy says monthly credits; this dataset preserves the card’s record unit rather than treating it as another vendor’s API credit.

Bright Data also prices separate product families, including proxy networks, Scraper Studio, Scraping Browser, SERP API, Web Unlocker, datasets and Bright Insights. A rate from one family should not be applied to another.

Evaluate Bright Data for your workload: Review Bright Data’s Web Scraper API plans and confirm the current plan terms before purchase. Compare the same permitted targets, required fields and accepted records used for the other providers. This affiliate URL’s configured destination is Web Scraper API pricing; its public redirect could not be independently verified in this audit. It does not establish a performance ranking. The pricing dataset above was rechecked on October 2, 2026.

How to Compare the Real Cost

Use a fixed workload rather than dividing the monthly fee by the headline credit count.

1. Define the target set, required fields, geographies and refresh frequency.
2. Record the expected JavaScript, premium-proxy and anti-bot multipliers.
3. Run the same sample against each provider and count accepted records, retries and failures.
4. Add storage, proxy, egress and human-review costs where they are billed separately.
5. Calculate cost per accepted record and cost per completed refresh.

The useful equation is:

total monthly cost = vendor invoice + separately billed infrastructure + review labor

The vendor invoice already contains the subscription and any invoiced overage. Do not count prepaid usage, included compute or bundled proxies again. Add storage, egress or other infrastructure only when separately billed; Bright Data’s captured Web Scraper API calculator includes proxies, unblocking, parsing and compute/runtime.

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: October 2, 2026.
• Dataset: 28 source-backed claims with stable IDs, source URLs, source-quality labels, methodology notes and caveats. These are compiled plan and billing facts, not 28 independent studies.
• Currency: USD amounts displayed by the vendors. ScraperAPI annual figures are monthly equivalents of annual billing; Apify advertises a 10% annual discount without separate captured annual amounts. ScrapingBee explicitly excludes VAT; the other captures do not settle tax treatment. 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 after a substantive source audit. The October refresh changes prices, plan scope and request-cost guidance; it does not claim a new performance benchmark.

Last verified: October 2, 2026.

Cite This Research

Recommended citation:

Tugelbay Konabayev. “Web Scraping API Pricing 2026: Four Providers Compared.” Konabayev.com. Updated October 2, 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 October 2, 2026.</p>

Frequently Asked Questions

Which web scraping API is cheapest to start?

Among the paid plans with reliable captured amounts, Apify Starter and ScrapingBee Hobby tie at $19 monthly before applicable taxes. Bright Data’s paid amount was not verified. Free starting allowances are Apify’s $5 monthly platform usage, ScraperAPI’s 1,000 credits with 5 connections, ScrapingBee’s 1,000 credits without a card, and Bright Data’s 5,000 records per month. The captured ScraperAPI and ScrapingBee pages do not establish renewal cadence. A lower list price does not establish a lower cost per accepted result.

Are ScraperAPI and ScrapingBee credits directly comparable?

No equivalence is established. ScraperAPI publishes target-specific costs; the captured ScrapingBee pricing page does not give consumption rules. Check the vendor’s documentation and test the same workload before comparing effective unit cost.

Does Apify charge per page?

Not at the platform-plan level. Apify meters compute, rented Actors, proxies, storage and data transfer. Check the selected Actor’s own pricing before estimating the bill.

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. Our dataset compilation is available under CC BY 4.0. Download the CSV, JSON or JSONL; credit Konabayev.com and retain source URLs, audit dates and caveats. This permission covers our compilation, not the vendors’ source pages or trademarks.

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.