ScraperAPI is one of the oldest general-purpose scraping APIs: proxy rotation, retries, CAPTCHA handling and JavaScript rendering behind a single endpoint, sold by API credit.
Seven published tiers, which is more granularity than anyone else on this page.
What it costs
| Plan | Price/month | Annual (per month) | API credits | Per 1,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | — | 1,000 | — |
| Hobby | $49 | $44.10 | 100,000 | $0.490 |
| Startup | $149 | $134.10 | 1,000,000 | $0.149 |
| Business | $299 | $269.10 | 3,000,000 | $0.100 |
| Scaling | $475 | $427.50 | 5,000,000 | $0.095 |
| Professional | $975 | $877.50 | 10,500,000 | $0.093 |
| Advanced | $1,975 | $1,777.50 | 21,500,000 | $0.092 |
| Enterprise | custom | — | 22,000,000+ | — |
The first seven days after signup include 5,000 free requests on top of the 1,000/month free tier, which is capped at 5 concurrent connections.
$0.092 per 1,000 at the top tier puts it in the same bracket as ScrapingBee's $0.075 — the two cheapest units in this comparison, and both for the same reason: a credit buys a fetch.
Where the curve flattens, and why it matters
Look at the per-1,000 column from Business down: $0.100, $0.095, $0.093, $0.092. The rate barely moves while the monthly commitment goes from $299 to $1,975.
That is a 6.6× increase in spend for a 7.8% improvement in unit rate. If you are choosing a tier, the interesting decision is Hobby → Startup ($0.490 → $0.149, a 3.3× improvement) and everything above Business is buying headroom, not a discount.
We publish that because the per-1,000 column is the whole reason to have one, and a table that just lists seven prices hides the shape.
What a credit does not buy
Same trade as every general scraper here: you get the page, not the field.
An Instagram profile comes back as HTML. followers as an integer, across eleven
platforms, in one response shape, is a parsing problem you now own — and we have
published what that maintenance actually looks like,
because the field we read for Pinterest is not the one anybody would guess.
Who it's for
ScraperAPI is a strong default for general scraping at volume, and the seven tiers mean you can match spend to usage more precisely than with most of this field.
It is the wrong purchase if the output you want is structured social metrics. The test is the same one we apply to ourselves: if you write a parser after the API responds, the API did not answer your question.
Where it is better than us
Any URL. Eleven platforms against the whole web is not a close comparison.
Tier granularity. Seven published prices. We have a free tier and credit packs.
Unit price at volume. $0.092 per 1,000 is far below our per-credit cost.
Concurrency at scale. Their upper tiers carry concurrency limits built for crawling. Ours are built for request-response.
The legal part
A general scraper moves target choice, and therefore compliance, onto the buyer. Different place for the same question, not a better one.
We publish our line on public versus personal data and a removal route.
Who measured this
We did, and we compete in this category — so the arithmetic is the part to check.
⚠️ The reading is one grade weaker than most on this site.
scraperapi.com/pricing returned a page without the price table in it — the
title and navigation came through and the plans did not. The numbers above come
from search restricted to scraperapi.com, including
docs.scraperapi.com/resources/faq/plans-and-billing. Primary source, and not
the same as reading the table, so it is said here rather than buried.
The per-1,000 column and the flattening-curve observation are our arithmetic on their numbers; you can redo both.
What we run is an hourly archive of what's rising across public platforms. What we sell is parsed JSON in one shape — the work a general scraper deliberately leaves with you.
Plan prices, annual rates and credit counts read from scraperapi.com on 2 October 2026 via search restricted to that domain, because the pricing page returned without its price table. Primary source, one grade below a direct page read, and flagged as such. The per-1,000 column and the Hobby→Startup comparison are our arithmetic on their numbers. Verify before deciding.