ScraperAPI alternatives, sorted by why you are leaving
ScraperAPI is 1 credit a page until the page fights back. Then it is 10, 25, 30 or as many as 75, and that multiplier is the bill. 4 replacements below, each one matched to a specific reason.
If you want the same model at a lower rate, ScrapingBee is the closest of these ScraperAPI alternatives: a default rendered page costs 5 credits there against 10 here, and its credits are cheaper on every comparable plan. If your pages go into a model, Firecrawl charges 1 credit a page with rendering included. If most of your volume is hard targets or Google, Bright Data's flat $1.50 per 1,000 on success beats a 25-credit multiplier. If the job is one platform's records, an Apify Actor already does it.
Prices and limits for every option below are read off the vendor's own page. These are the ScraperAPI competitors that each answer a named problem.
The 3 reasons people actually leave
If none of these is your situation, the honest answer is that you should probably stay. The 28 providers in the Sourcing APIs listing are where these replacements come from.
1 · The multipliers decide the bill, not the plan
A standard page is 1 credit. Rendering or premium proxies are 10, both are 25, Google and Bing are 25, LinkedIn and ultra premium proxies 30, ultra premium with rendering 75, and a site behind Cloudflare, Datadome or PerimeterX adds 10 more. On Hobby at $0.00049 a credit, a rendered page is $0.0049 and a Google results page is about $0.0123, so the same plan buys very different volumes.
2 · Credits do not roll over
Hobby is $49 for 100,000 credits a month, Startup $149 for 1,000,000, Business $299 for 3,000,000, and what you do not use is gone. A crawl that runs every other month pays for the empty month too.
3 · Concurrency is the ceiling, and it is set by the plan
Threads run from 5 on the free plan to 20 on Hobby, 50 on Startup and 100 on Business. Going over returns a 429 that is turned away rather than queued, at no charge, so a deadline-bound job is sized by the plan's thread count rather than by its credits.
4 ScraperAPI alternatives, and what each one fixes
Ordered by how closely each one answers the reasons above, not by price.
| Provider | Entry price | Unit cost | Free tier | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ScraperAPI | $49/mo | $0.00049 per credit | 1,000 free API credits a month at 5 concurrent connections, plus a 7-day trial with 5,000 credits and no card. | Baseline |
| ScrapingBee | $19/mo | $0.00025 per credit | 1,000 free API credits to try it, no card. | Best for cheap rendered pages at volume |
| Firecrawl | $16/mo annual | $0.0032 per credit | Free plan, 1,000 credits a month, no card. Keyless scrape and search too. | Best for turning sites into model input |
| Bright Data | $1.50/1K requests | $0.0015 per request | 5,000 credits a month across the SERP, Unlocker and Scraper APIs, no card. A hard stop, not a bill. | Best for search results and pre-built scrapers at volume |
| Apify | $19/mo | $0.20 per compute unit | Free plan, $5 of platform usage a month, no card. Blocked rather than billed when it runs out. | Best for a scraper somebody already built |
Read from each vendor's own pricing page on 24 October 2026.
The case for each one
Each one below is matched to a reason rather than scored, and each one names what you give up by taking it. A replacement with no downside is a replacement nobody has actually run.
ScrapingBee
The same model, cheaper: a default rendered page is 5 credits, and a credit is $0.000099 on Startup against ScraperAPI's $0.000149.
ScrapingBee is the like-for-like replacement: one endpoint, credits that depend on the configuration, proxies and rendering handled. The difference is the multiplier on the most common call. A rendered page is 5 credits on ScrapingBee and 10 on ScraperAPI.
Combine that with the plan rates and the gap compounds. On Startup, ScrapingBee is $99 for 1,000,000 credits, about $0.0005 a rendered page; ScraperAPI's Startup is $149 for 1,000,000, about $0.0015 a rendered page. At the entry plans it is $0.0013 against $0.0049.
Concurrency is also higher at each step: 25 on Hobby, 50 on Freelance, 100 on Startup, 200 on Business. A 429 for going over is not billed on either service.
What you give up
Pay as you go and the free monthly allowance. ScrapingBee's stealth tier is 75 credits, the same as ScraperAPI's ultra premium with rendering, there is no pay-as-you-go option, and the free credits are a one-off 1,000 rather than 1,000 a month.
When it is the wrong answer
A team that wants pay as you go or a monthly free allowance to keep a staging job alive. ScrapingBee sells neither: its plans are monthly and its 1,000 free credits are a one-off.
Firecrawl
One credit a page with rendering included, returned as Markdown. The flat price when the output is going into a model.
Firecrawl has no rendering multiplier at all. A basic scrape, crawl or map is 1 credit a page with JavaScript handled; the JSON, Question and Highlight formats add 4. On ScraperAPI the same rendered page is 10 credits before anything else.
At Firecrawl's rates that is $0.0032 a page on Hobby, $16 a month on annual billing for 5,000 credits, and $0.00083 on Standard at $83 billed annually for 100,000. A rendered page on ScraperAPI's Hobby is $0.0049 and on its Startup $0.0015.
The output is the other half of the case. Firecrawl returns clean Markdown, so a pipeline that was fetching HTML only to strip it for a model loses a step. The free plan is 1,000 credits a month with no card.
What you give up
Throughput per dollar on simple pages, and the hard targets. A plain unrendered page is 1 ScraperAPI credit at $0.000149 on Startup, which Firecrawl does not match, and Firecrawl says sites that fight scrapers will fight it too.
When it is the wrong answer
High-volume HTML collection where nobody needs Markdown, and Google or Bing results.
Read the review · ScraperAPI vs Firecrawl
Bright Data
A flat $1.50 per 1,000 on success for SERP, unblocking and pre-built scrapers. The cheaper rate once the multipliers pile up.
Bright Data prices its three API products the same way: $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests or records, whatever the page took. On ScraperAPI a Google results page is 25 credits and a protected site adds 10, so for the hard targets the flat rate is the cheaper one.
On ScraperAPI's Hobby, a Google page is about $0.0123 and a rendered page behind Cloudflare about $0.0098; Bright Data is $0.0015 for either on pay as you go. Scale at $499 a month buys about 380,000 requests and pays for itself above roughly 333,000.
Concurrency is advertised as unlimited, with 1,000 SERP requests a minute on an account that holds no funds. The free tier is 5,000 credits a month shared across the three APIs.
What you give up
Simplicity and the cheap easy page. Bright Data is a large product with zones and plans to configure, and a plain page that costs 1 ScraperAPI credit costs the same $0.0015 here as a hard one.
When it is the wrong answer
Crawls of mostly simple, unprotected pages, where ScraperAPI's 1-credit page on a larger plan is cheaper.
Apify
If the job is one platform's records, an Actor priced per result replaces the fetching and the parsing.
Many ScraperAPI pipelines fetch pages from one platform and parse them into records. Apify Store usually has an Actor for that platform, maintained by someone else, started and read through one REST API.
Most Store Actors price per result; Google Maps Scraper is from $1.50 per 1,000 places. Actors that bill compute use compute units at $0.20 on Starter. The Website Content Crawler page estimates $0.20 per 1,000 pages over raw HTTP and $0.50 to $5 with a headless browser, worked out at an older $0.25 a unit, so on Starter the same run should cost about a fifth less.
Plans are prepaid usage in dollars, $5 free and then $19, $199 or $999 a month. Concurrent runs go from 5 on Free to 256 on Business.
What you give up
A single predictable fetch price. Every Actor sets its own rate, and unused prepaid usage expires each month instead of the credits.
When it is the wrong answer
Fetching arbitrary pages across many sites, which is what ScraperAPI is for and what a platform-specific Actor is not.
What you would actually pay, on each one
Every provider on this page publishes a rate card, so the real numbers can sit next to each other rather than behind a summary. The plan you want is the one whose included volume covers a normal month for you, not the cheapest one on the page.
ScraperAPI
ScraperAPI publishes 8 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $49 to $1,975, with a quoted tier above it.
Free
- 5 concurrent connections
- Plus a 7-day trial with 5,000 credits, no card
Hobby
- 100,000 API credits a month
- 20 concurrent threads, US and EU geotargeting only
- $0.00049 a credit, so $0.0049 a rendered page
Startup
- 1,000,000 API credits a month
- 50 concurrent threads, US and EU geotargeting only
Business
- 3,000,000 API credits a month
- 100 concurrent threads, global geotargeting
Scaling
- 5,000,000 API credits a month
- 200 concurrent threads, pay as you go past the allowance
Enterprise
- 22,000,000+ API credits, 500+ concurrent threads
- Ultra Premium keeps a minimum of $3 per 1,000 requests, $7 rendered
2 steps between the fifth and the last are not drawn here. The cost model below reads all 8.
ScrapingBee
ScrapingBee publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $19 to $249.
Hobby
- 25 concurrent requests
- 15,000 default rendered calls
- $0.000253 a credit
Freelance
- 50 concurrent requests
- 50,000 default rendered calls
- $0.000196 a credit
Startup
- 100 concurrent requests
- 200,000 default rendered calls
- $0.000099 a credit
Business
- 200 concurrent requests
- 600,000 default rendered calls
- Business + is $599 for 8,000,000
Firecrawl
Firecrawl publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $16 to $333.
Free
- No cost, no card
- 1,000 pages or 500 searches
- 2 concurrent browsers
- Plus the keyless endpoints, which need no account
Hobby
- $19 a month paying month to month
- 2,500 searches or 5,000 pages scraped
- 5 concurrent requests
- $0.0032 a credit
- 1,000 extra credits per $5
Standard
- $99 a month paying month to month
- 50,000 searches or 100,000 pages scraped
- 25 concurrent requests
- $0.00083 a credit, four times better than Hobby
- 2,000 extra credits per $5
Growth
- 50 concurrent requests
- Scale is $599 a month for 1,000,000 credits
- Enterprise above that
Bright Data
Bright Data publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and pay as you go with no minimum above the free allowance.
Free tier
- No credit card
- Shared across SERP, Unlocker and Scraper APIs
- Renews on the 1st, never rolls over
- Stops hard when spent, no surprise bill
Pay as you go
- Charged on success only
- Monthly spend limits you set
- Unlimited concurrency
- A prepaid wallet, so only deposited funds are spent
Scale
- $1.30 per 1,000 above the allowance
- 383,000 on the Unlocker plan, 384,000 records on Scraper
- About $1.31 per 1,000 when the allowance is used
- Cancel anytime
Enterprise
- Volume discounts
- Account manager and premium SLA
- SSO
- Priority support
Apify
Apify publishes 4 tiers, one of them free, and the paid ladder runs from $19 to $999.
Free
- No credit card
- Compute at $0.20 a CU, 16 GB of RAM
- 5 concurrent runs
- Blocked, not billed, when the $5 runs out
Starter
- $19 of prepaid usage a month
- Compute at $0.20 a CU, 64 GB of RAM
- 32 concurrent runs
- Bronze discount on Store Actors
Scale
- $199 of prepaid usage a month
- Compute at $0.16 a CU, 256 GB of RAM
- 128 concurrent runs
- Silver discount on Store Actors
Business
- $999 of prepaid usage a month
- Compute at $0.13 a CU, 512 GB of RAM
- 256 concurrent runs
- Gold discount and an account manager
Read the included volume before the headline price. A plan that costs twice as much and carries five times the credits is the cheaper plan, and on this page that is the usual case rather than the exception.
What each one costs at your volume
ScraperAPI first, then every replacement. The model picks the cheapest published plan that covers your volume on each one, which is the comparison a row of entry prices cannot make.
ScraperAPI
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
ScrapingBee
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
Firecrawl
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
Bright Data
Priced on the volume you use, so the plan that covers a normal month is the one that decides the bill.
Apify
Its plans are not metered in records, so the figure below is the entry plan rather than a forecast.
Plans are read from each vendor's own pricing page and the model picks the cheapest one that covers you, so these are list prices on the billing term each vendor publishes, annual where that is how it prices, before any discount you negotiate. Apify publishes plans that are not metered in records, so the figure shown is the entry plan rather than your bill.
What a year costs at three volumes
The same plan-fit arithmetic as the model above, run out to a year, because an annual number is what a budget actually asks for.
ScrapingBee and Apify publish only an entry price, so those columns are the floor for a year, not a forecast.
| A year at | ScraperAPI | ScrapingBee | Firecrawl | Bright Data | Apify |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 a month | $0 Free | $228 Hobby | $0 Free | $0 Free tier | $228 |
| 10,000 a month | $588 Hobby | $228 Hobby | $996 Standard | $180 Pay as you go | $228 |
| 50,000 a month | $588 Hobby | $228 Hobby | $996 Standard | $900 Pay as you go | $228 |
These are list prices on the published plan that covers each volume, on the billing term each vendor publishes, so they are the number before you negotiate.
Where the data comes from, and what you may do with it
The question that arrives late and expensively is who is allowed to hold the data. A migration is the moment to check it, because you are signing a new contract anyway.
| Provider | Fields returned | Coverage | Compliance | Redistribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ScraperAPI | Firmographics, Technographics, Intent and news, Web pages | Global | None published | Not stated |
| ScrapingBee | Firmographics, Intent and news, Web pages, Search results | Global | GDPR DPA | Not stated |
| Firecrawl | Firmographics, Technographics, Intent and news, Web pages | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II | Not stated |
| Bright Data | Firmographics, Job postings, LinkedIn profile, Search results, Web pages | Global | ISO 27001 SOC 2 Type II GDPR CCPA | Not stated |
| Apify | Firmographics, Web pages | Global | SOC 2 GDPR | Not stated |
None of these states a redistribution position on its pricing or docs pages. Internally that never matters. Put the rows in something your customers can see and it becomes the question your legal team asks first.
Two practical notes that apply to every provider on this page. A compliance badge describes the vendor rather than your use of it, so a GDPR DPA does not give you a lawful basis for the outreach you send. And every one of these vendors runs its own opt-out, which means a person who asks you to delete their record has to be removed from your copy as well as from theirs.
Moving off ScraperAPI
Written against ScrapingBee, the first pick above, because the steps are the same whichever one you take and the specifics are what make them useful. Swap the name and the order still holds.
Measure the thing you are about to lose
Replay 100 of the queries, URLs or lookups you really send through ScraperAPI and record the usable results, the failures and what each one cost. Without that baseline every provider looks cheaper per call than the one you are paying for today.
Check which fields change
ScrapingBee does not return technographics, which ScraperAPI does. If anything downstream reads that field, the switch changes your pipeline as well as your vendor.
Rewrite the auth and the limits, in that order
ScraperAPI authenticates with an API key as the api_key query parameter. ScrapingBee uses a bearer API key; the api_key query parameter is deprecated except for MCP.
The limits are the part that bites later. ScraperAPI's limits: concurrent threads by plan: 5 on Free, 20 Hobby, 50 Startup, 100 Business, 200 Scaling, 300 Professional, 500 Advanced. Over the limit is a 429, turned away rather than queued, at no charge.
ScrapingBee's limits: concurrency per plan, 25 to 900 requests at once. No per-minute cap published for scraping. A loop tuned to the first will either crawl or get throttled on the second.
Run both for one billing cycle
Keep the old key live and route a slice of real traffic to the new one. A month is the shortest honest test, because credit expiry, rollover and the overage rate only show up at renewal and those are where the surprises live.
Cancel on the renewal date
Credits on most of these plans do not survive a downgrade. Check what happens to the balance you have already paid for, and time the switch so you are not buying the same records twice.
The step people skip is the first one, and it is the only one that cannot be done after the fact. Once the old key is off you have nothing to compare the new one against, so a provider that is quietly worse on your workload looks like a provider that is fine.
What practitioners say about Firecrawl
Transcribed as written and linked to the thread. A Reddit claim is a signal rather than a fact, so nothing here is the only source for any figure on this page.
A credit is a page until you turn on the features you came for
The credit inflation thing is crazy. From "1 credit = 1 page" to burning 5-9 per page the second you enable anything actually useful is not an accident, that's a deliberate design choice if you ask me. [...] Product is good, no question. Just know what you're getting into before you start building on it
r/ProxyEngineering · May 2026 · 3 points
The mechanism is confirmed by Firecrawl's own documentation, which states that operations cost different amounts of credits and names JSON extraction and Interact as the dear ones, so heavier usage reaches the credit cap sooner. That is the thing to model before sizing a plan: the rate card above quotes 1 credit a page, and the page you actually want is usually not a basic scrape.
The 5 to 9 multiplier is this commenter's own and nothing here verifies it, and the rest of their comment is about GitHub stars and the self-hosting license rather than about the API. Take the shape of the warning, read the operations table against your own pipeline, and treat the baseline rate as the cheap case rather than the typical one.
14 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by vendor name. Scores and dates are the comment's own. Nothing here is the only source for a price or a limit on this site: every figure in the tables above comes from a vendor's own page.
Should you actually switch?
The short answer is at the top of this page. Before you act on it, run the test below, because it is the cheapest way to find out whether that answer holds for you.
Scrapers differ on the pages that fight back. Take fifty URLs you actually fetch, the hardest ones included, and run them through their free tiers. Count the pages that came back usable and what each cost in credits. The easy pages look the same everywhere; the hard ones decide the bill.
Head to head, and in a stack
Firecrawl vs ScraperAPI
CompareOne credit a rendered page as Markdown, against one credit a plain page as HTML. The multipliers decide which is cheaper.
Compare them →Apify vs ScraperAPI
CompareA published multiplier for every hard page against a platform where the hard page is priced by the run.
Compare them →All alternatives
57Every provider in the directory that teams regularly try to replace, with the reasons and the replacements for each.
Browse the hub →Before you switch, try the waterfall in Clay.
Clay runs a waterfall across 150+ data providers from one table, without a separate contract with each. A lookup that finds nothing costs no data credit, and the free plan includes 500 actions a month.
Frontal is a Clay Elite Studio Partner.
Switching from ScraperAPI, answered
What is the best ScraperAPI alternative?
It depends on why you are leaving, which is how this page is organized rather than ranked. The first pick here is ScrapingBee, which this directory lists as the best for cheap rendered pages at volume, at $19/mo. The case for it, and what you give up, is in the section above.
Is there a free alternative to ScraperAPI?
Yes, 4 of the replacements here do. ScrapingBee: 1,000 free API credits to try it, no card. Firecrawl: Free plan, 1,000 credits a month, no card. Keyless scrape and search too. Bright Data: 5,000 credits a month across the SERP, Unlocker and Scraper APIs, no card. A hard stop, not a bill. Apify: Free plan, $5 of platform usage a month, no card. Blocked rather than billed when it runs out.
What is the cheapest ScraperAPI alternative?
At 10,000 credits a month, ScrapingBee: $19 a month against ScraperAPI at $49, on the cheapest plan of each that carries the API. The cost model above moves with your own volume.
How were these alternatives chosen?
By the reason teams leave, not by a score. The page opens with the reasons teams leave and matches a replacement to each one.