ScrapingBee does one thing and does it well: you send a URL, it deals with proxies, retries and JavaScript, and you get HTML back. Nobody looks for an alternative because the fetch failed.
They look for one of two reasons, and only one of them is about price.
We have a full page on ScrapingBee with the pricing table. This page does not repeat it — it answers why you are leaving.
What it costs today
| Plan | Price/month | API credits | Concurrent | Per 1,000 credits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby | $19 | 75,000 | 25 | $0.2533 |
| Freelance | $49 | 250,000 | 50 | $0.1960 |
| Startup | $99 | 1,000,000 | 100 | $0.0990 |
| Business | $249 | 3,000,000 | 200 | $0.0830 |
| Business+ | $599 | 8,000,000 | 400 | $0.0749 |
Free: 1,000 credits, no card. The per-1,000 column is our arithmetic on their plan prices and credit counts.
Reason 1: a credit is not a credit, and the page says so without a number
Their own words, on the pricing page we read today:
"A basic request costs 1 credit, while features like JavaScript rendering, premium proxies, or AI extraction increase the cost"
That is the whole problem in one sentence. They tell you the multiplier exists and they do not tell you what it is. So every figure in the column above is a floor — the rate of a request that needs nothing — and your real rate depends on how many of your targets need rendering.
What fixes it: a vendor that bills one unit per call with no feature multiplier. We bill per API call with a per-endpoint cost owned by one database row — one number, published, and the same whether the page was slow.
What does not fix it: Scrapfly, where a credit also varies by feature, and Xpoz, where Instagram costs 6× a Reddit query in the same plan. Different multiplier, same surprise.
Reason 2: the HTML is the easy half
A fetch API hands you the page. You still write the selectors, and then you own them: every time Instagram moves a field, your parser breaks and your monitoring tells you about it after the data is already wrong.
What fixes it: an API that returns the parsed field. For social platforms
that is us — followers as an integer in the same place across twelve
platforms, or null with the reason published — or
ScrapeCreators and
EnsembleData, which own their endpoints too.
What does not fix it: ScraperAPI parses some large retail and search targets and hands you HTML for the rest, and Apify gives you a marketplace where someone else's Actor does the parsing — which moves the maintenance to a person you have not met.
The options, side by side
| Unit | Entry | Free tier | You get back | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ScrapingBee | credit (1 + unpublished multiplier) | $19/mo · $0.2533/1K | 1,000 credits, no expiry | HTML, you parse |
| ScraperAPI | credit, fixed rate on big domains | $49/mo · $0.4900/1K | 5,000 credits, 7 days | HTML + some structured |
| Scrape.do | fetch | $29/mo · $0.116/1K | see page | HTML, you parse |
| ScrapeCreators | credit | $47 · $1.88/1K | 100 credits, never expire | parsed social JSON |
| HonestHook | API call | free, 1,000 credits/mo | 1,000/mo, renewing | parsed JSON, 12 platforms |
Note what that table says against us: on raw fetch price, ScrapingBee is three to twenty-five times cheaper per thousand than the social-specific APIs, ours included. You are not paying for the request — you are paying for the parsing and the contract.
Where ScrapingBee is still the right answer
Any target that is not a social platform. We serve twelve platforms and name them. ScrapingBee serves any URL, and most of the web is not a social profile.
Price per fetch, by a wide margin. $0.0749 per 1,000 at Business+ is among the lowest rates in this market, and no parsed-JSON vendor comes near it.
Concurrency per dollar. 25 concurrent requests on the $19 tier, 400 on Business+. If your job is "fetch a hundred thousand pages tonight", that is the product.
A free tier that does not expire. 1,000 credits, no card, no seven-day clock — better than most of this market, including several pages in this family.
Where we are better, stated narrowly
Twelve platforms with one response shape and
a published per-field contract. The same field in the
same place on all twelve, or null with a stated reason — Linktree returns
followers: null by decision, because a link list is not an account someone
follows.
And an hourly archive of what is rising, never deleted. A fetch API answers what does this page say now; only an archive answers what accelerated, and it cannot be bought later because the past was not photographed.
If you need HTML from anywhere, ScrapingBee is a better buy than we are.
Get a free key — 1,000 credits a month, no card. Start here.
ScrapingBee plan prices, credit counts, concurrency, the 1,000-credit free tier and the quoted sentence about feature cost read from scrapingbee.com on 3 October 2026 — primary source, read directly from the page. The per-1,000 column is our arithmetic on their numbers. The credit cost of JavaScript rendering, premium proxies and AI extraction is not published on that page and is not estimated here. Prices of the other competitors are on their own pages, each with its own reading date. Verify before deciding.