Six pages on the first results page are written about this pair, which makes sense: the two products do almost exactly the same thing. You send a URL, they deal with proxies and rendering, you get HTML back and parse it yourself.
Because they sell the same shape, this is the one pair where a per-credit comparison is close to fair — and it is still not the answer. Here is why.
ScrapingBee — read directly 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.
⚠️ What a credit costs them to serve is NOT on the page we read. They list JavaScript rendering, premium proxies and geotargeting as features by tier, without saying how many credits each consumes. So every figure in that last column is a floor — the rate of a one-credit request — and this page does not present it as what you will pay.
ScraperAPI — one grade weaker, for the second time
Their pricing page came back truncated with no numbers at all, exactly as on
2 October. So these figures come from search restricted to scraperapi.com.
| Plan | Price/month | API credits | Threads | Per 1,000 credits |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby | $49 | 100,000 | 20 | $0.4900 |
| Startup | $149 | 1,000,000 | 50 | $0.1490 |
| Business | $299 | 3,000,000 | 100 | $0.0997 |
| Scaling | $475 | 5,000,000 | 200 | $0.0950 |
| Professional | $975 | 10,500,000 | 300 | $0.0929 |
Free: 7 days, 5,000 credits, no card. Geotargeting and crawler access are on every plan. Annual billing is 10% off, according to them.
🔴 And there is no annual column on this page, deliberately. On 2 October our own ScraperAPI page published six annual prices — all exactly 10% below monthly, which means calculated — under a footer claiming they had been read. A reviewer caught it. The discount is confirmed at the source today and the column still does not appear: publishing the arithmetic does not repair the attribution.
The comparison, at the two points where they meet
At $49/month: 250,000 credits against 100,000. That is 2.5× the credits for the same money, and ScrapingBee also gives 50 concurrent requests against 20. On sticker, it is not close.
At the published ceiling: $0.0749 against $0.0929 per 1,000. ScrapingBee is 1.24× cheaper per credit — but the ceiling costs $599 on one and $975 on the other, and the quota differs (8,000,000 against 10,500,000). Different purchases at different sizes.
⚠️ Now the part that undoes both numbers: a credit is not a credit.
- ScrapingBee does not publish, on the page we read, how many credits a JavaScript render or a premium proxy costs. If the multiplier is large, the 2.5× advantage shrinks by exactly that factor on real traffic.
- ScraperAPI bills Google and large retail sites at a fixed domain rate rather than per credit, and includes geotargeting on every plan — ScrapingBee lists geotargeting as a tiered feature.
So the real question is not which credit is cheaper, it is which multiplier applies to your traffic, and neither page answers it for your mix. The only way to know is to run a hundred of your own URLs through both free tiers — 1,000 credits on one, 5,000 for 7 days on the other — and read the invoice.
Where each one wins
ScrapingBee wins on credits and concurrency per dollar at the entry and mid tiers, and on a free tier that does not expire after a week.
ScraperAPI wins on free country targeting, on structured endpoints that do more of the parsing for you, and on a 5× larger free trial while it lasts.
Both win over us on any target that is not one of twelve social platforms. They hand you HTML for anything; we hand you parsed JSON for twelve things.
Where we fit
Neither of them parses a social profile for you — both deliberately. You get HTML and write the selectors, and then you maintain those selectors every time Instagram moves a field.
We sell the parsed field instead: followers as an
integer in the same place across twelve platforms, or null with the reason
published. That is a different purchase, and it is cheaper only if the twelve
are what you needed.
| You get back | Entry | Free tier | Scope | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ScrapingBee | HTML, you parse | $19/mo · $0.2533/1K | 1,000 credits, no expiry | any URL |
| ScraperAPI | HTML + some structured | $49/mo · $0.4900/1K | 5,000 credits, 7 days | any URL |
| HonestHook | parsed JSON | free, 1,000 credits/mo | 1,000/mo, renewing | 12 social platforms |
And the hourly archive, which answers what accelerated rather than what does this page say now — the one question no fetch API can answer after the fact, because the past was not photographed.
Deeper on each: ScrapingBee · ScraperAPI.
Get a free key — 1,000 credits a month, no card. Start here.
ScrapingBee plan prices, credit counts, concurrency and the 1,000-credit free tier read from scrapingbee.com on 3 October 2026 — primary source, read directly from the page; the per-request credit cost of JavaScript rendering, premium proxies and geotargeting is not published there and is not estimated here. ScraperAPI plan prices, credit counts, thread limits, the 7-day 5,000-credit trial and the 10% annual discount read from scraperapi.com on 3 October 2026 via search restricted to that domain, because their pricing page returned no figures — one grade below a rendered table, and flagged as such in the body. Both per-1,000 columns and the 2.5× and 1.24× ratios are our arithmetic on their numbers. Verify before deciding.