We already compare Apify against Bright Data and Apify against ScrapingBee. This is the third edge of that triangle, and the reason it exists is that four separate competitor domains maintain a page about these three vendors together — the strongest demand signal in our own search measurement.
It is also the pair where both vendors stop short of the number you need.
What Bright Data costs
Read directly from their residential proxy pricing page today.
| Commitment | Monthly cost | GB included | Per-GB rate, as published |
|---|---|---|---|
| Pay-as-you-go | none | — | $8/GB |
| Tier 1 | $499 | 141 GB | $7/GB |
| Tier 2 | $999 | 332 GB | $6/GB |
| Tier 3 | $1,999 | 798 GB | $5/GB |
Above 1 TB the page says to contact them. There is no monthly minimum on pay-as-you-go, which matters more than the headline rate: an idle month costs nothing.
⚠️ Their tiers do not reconcile, and we are not going to smooth it over
Divide the monthly cost by the GB included and you do not get the rate printed beside it:
Tier 1 $499 ÷ 141 GB = $3.54/GB published beside it: $7/GB
Tier 2 $999 ÷ 332 GB = $3.01/GB published beside it: $6/GB
Tier 3 $1,999 ÷ 798 GB = $2.51/GB published beside it: $5/GB
That arithmetic is ours, on their published numbers. We do not know which figure governs a bill, and we are not picking one — a comparison that quietly chose the flattering number would be exactly the tidy table this family exists to avoid. If you are committing at these volumes, make them put the effective rate in writing.
⚠️ There is also a 50%-off code advertised for three months, and a dollar-for-dollar deposit match up to $500. Neither is published here as a price. A time-boxed offer is not a rate card, and planning on one is how a budget breaks in month four.
What ScrapingBee costs
| Plan | Monthly price | API credits | Concurrency |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby | $19 | 75,000 | 25 |
| Freelance | $49 | 250,000 | 50 |
| Startup | $99 | 1,000,000 | 100 |
| Business | $249 | 3,000,000 | 200 |
| Business + | $599 | 8,000,000 | 400 |
The trial is 1,000 credits with no credit card.
⚠️ The credit table is the missing half
A credit is the billing unit, and the pricing page we read does not publish what a request costs in credits. It says which capabilities belong to which plan — JavaScript rendering, rotating and premium proxies, the dedicated scraping APIs — but not the credit price of using them.
So $19 for 75,000 credits is not a price per scrape. It is a price per
75,000 of something whose size is set elsewhere. If JavaScript rendering costs
several credits and a premium proxy costs several more, the same $19 buys a
very different number of real requests, and nothing on the page lets you work
out which.
We are flagging the absence rather than filling it from a blog post. A number we did not read at the source does not go in this table.
So what can you actually compare?
Not cost per scrape — neither vendor publishes enough for that. What is comparable is the shape of the commitment:
| Bright Data | ScrapingBee | |
|---|---|---|
| Unit | gigabyte delivered | credit, size unpublished |
| Floor | none on pay-as-you-go | $19/month |
| Idle month costs | $0 | $19 |
| Known before you run? | no — depends on page weight | no — depends on the credit table |
| Concurrency published | not on this page | yes, per plan |
| What you are buying | bandwidth and unblocking | a managed request API |
Two different unknowns. Bright Data's resolves after one real job, because you can measure bytes. ScrapingBee's resolves only when they tell you the credit cost, or when you spend credits to find out.
Where each one wins
Bright Data wins on hard targets and on zero idle cost. A residential pool that size is what you buy when a site actively fights you, and pay-as-you-go means a quiet month bills nothing. If your volume is lumpy, the absent floor is worth more than any per-unit rate.
ScrapingBee wins on simplicity and on published concurrency. One endpoint, a flat monthly number, 25 parallel requests at the $19 tier, and a trial that needs no card. For a steady job against ordinary pages, the forecast is a calendar reminder rather than a spreadsheet.
Neither wins if what you need is the same field in the same place across social platforms. That is the next section, and it is a narrow claim.
Where we fit, and where we do not
HonestHook sells read access to twelve social platforms in one
response shape, billed per API call, with
a published per-field contract: the same field in the
same place on all twelve, or null with a stated reason.
| Unit | Entry | Floor | Scope | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bright Data | GB | pay-as-you-go | none | proxies, unblocking, the open web |
| ScrapingBee | credit | $19/mo · 1,000-credit trial | $19/mo | managed requests, the open web |
| HonestHook | API call | free, 1,000 credits/mo | none | 12 social platforms |
If your target is not one of those twelve, we have nothing for you and both vendors above do. That is most of the web, and we are not going to pretend otherwise.
The thing none of the three sells
An hourly archive of what is rising, kept and never deleted.
All three of us answer what is this page now. Only an archive answers what accelerated, and it cannot be added later — the past was not photographed.
Deeper on each: Bright Data · ScrapingBee · or the whole field.
Get a free key — 1,000 credits a month, no card. Start here.
Bright Data's $8/GB pay-as-you-go rate, the three commitment tiers with their monthly costs and included volumes, the published per-GB rates, the 1 TB contact threshold, the RESIGB50 50%-off code and the deposit match read from brightdata.com/pricing/proxy-network/residential-proxies on 3 October 2026 — primary source, read directly from the page. The per-GB division showing $3.54, $3.01 and $2.51 is our arithmetic on those published figures, labelled as ours in the body. ScrapingBee's five plans with prices, credit allowances and concurrency limits, and the 1,000-credit no-card trial, read from scrapingbee.com/pricing on 3 October 2026 — primary source. The per-request credit cost is recorded as not published because it was not on that page; we did not source it elsewhere. Verify before deciding.