ScrapingBee is a general-purpose scraping API: you give it a URL, it gives you back HTML or a screenshot, having dealt with proxies, retries and JavaScript rendering on the way.
It is near the bottom of this comparison on price per credit, and the reason is worth understanding before you decide it is cheap for you.
What it costs
| Plan | Price/month | API credits | Per 1,000 credits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby | $19 | 75,000 | $0.253 |
| Freelance | $49 | 250,000 | $0.196 |
| Startup | $99 | 1,000,000 | $0.099 |
| Business | $249 | 3,000,000 | $0.083 |
| Business + | $599 | 8,000,000 | $0.075 |
Prices are listed "exclusive of VAT". Signup gives 1,000 free credits with no card.
$0.075 per 1,000 is the second-lowest rate in this family, behind Scrape.do's $0.070 — and about 12× cheaper per unit than Supadata at its top tier, or 75.7× against Supadata's $17 plan.
We are not comparing it to EnsembleData here, even though an earlier draft of this page did: EnsembleData's price was not read in the 2 October measurement behind this family, and a cross-comparison against a number from a different reading date is exactly the mistake these pages exist to avoid.
Why the cheap credit is not the whole price
A ScrapingBee credit buys a fetch, not a field.
Ask it for an Instagram profile and you get the page. You do not get followers as an integer — you get HTML, and then you own the problem that the number lives in a JSON blob whose key name changes, that the blob moves, and that the page sometimes renders a login wall instead. That work is yours, forever, per platform.
This is the trade the whole category is organised around, and it is not a trick: a general scraper is cheap per request because it does less. The question is not which credit costs less. It is whether you want to maintain eleven parsers.
We publish what that maintenance looks like from the inside — the field we read for Pinterest followers is not the one anybody would guess, and the reason is a measurement, not a preference.
Who it's for
ScrapingBee is the right answer when the thing you are fetching is not a social platform, or when you already have parsers you trust.
If you are scraping product pages, documentation, job listings, or anything whose HTML you are happy to own, the arithmetic above is excellent and a social-specific API would be paying for structure you do not need.
If what you want is followers and posts_count across eleven networks in one response shape, you are buying parsers, and the credit price stops being the comparison.
Where it is better than us
Breadth of target. ScrapingBee fetches anything with a URL. We serve eleven platforms and we will tell you which ones and what each returns. If your eleventh target is a site nobody has an API for, we are not an option and they are.
Price per fetch. Only Scrape.do, at $0.070, goes lower — and both are far below anything we charge, because both sell a different unit.
Screenshots and JS rendering as first-class features. We do not offer either; we return JSON.
The legal part
A general-purpose scraper moves the compliance question onto you, which is neither better nor worse — it is just a different place for it to sit. You choose the targets, you accept their terms, and you decide what is public.
We publish our own position on public versus personal data and a removal route rather than claiming the question does not apply to us.
Who measured this
We did, and we compete in this category — so check the arithmetic, not our framing of it.
The per-thousand column is ours: the plan prices and credit counts are theirs, the division is arithmetic, and you can redo it in your head. We put it there because a page of monthly prices with different quotas is unreadable, and because the comparison that matters to a buyer is rate, not sticker.
What we run today is an hourly archive of what's rising across public platforms. What we sell is parsed JSON with one response shape, which is the thing ScrapingBee deliberately does not sell.
Plan prices and credit counts read from scrapingbee.com/pricing on 2 October 2026 — primary source, read directly from the page. The per-1,000 column is our arithmetic on their numbers. The VAT note and the 1,000-free-credit signup are quoted from the same page. Verify before deciding.