By use case · Cheapest web scraping API

Cheapest web scraping API: cheap scraper API and affordable scraping API cost per 1,000 pages

The short answer

There is no single cheapest web scraping API, because the answer flips with the kind of page. For plain server-rendered HTML, Zyte ($0.13 per 1,000 pay as you go, $0.06 with a commitment), ZenRows, ScrapingBee and Scrapfly all sit near $0.10 per 1,000 and are the cheapest in the category. For JavaScript-rendered pages, which is most of the modern web, the credit multipliers change the order: at about $50 a month Scrapfly Discovery is cheapest at $0.90 per 1,000 rendered pages, and from $99 upward ClawEngine is cheapest at $0.40 on Startup and $0.27 on Scale, because rendering is not a multiplier here. One million rendered pages a month costs $399 on ClawEngine, about $480 on Zyte if every target is its easiest tier, $549 on ZenRows and $599 on ScrapingBee.

Clean markdown & JSON · JavaScript rendered · robots.txt respected

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Endpoint: POST /v1/extract · paste a URL, or pick a sample below

POST

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robots.txt respected · public data only ·

Markdown · JSON · structured fields, from one API call. Crawling, rendering and extracting ... Samples are recorded. Your own URL is crawled live.

Every scraping API advertises a monthly price, and almost none of them sell pages. They sell credits, and a credit is only a page if you ask for the plainest possible fetch. Turn on JavaScript rendering, which most modern targets need, and one page costs 5 credits on ScrapingBee and ZenRows, 6 on Scrapfly and 10 on ScraperAPI. The price on the plan card stays the same while the number of pages it buys drops by a factor of five to ten.

So the only honest way to find the cheapest scraper API is to convert every plan into dollars per 1,000 rendered pages, then do it again for plain HTML, because the two rankings come out almost opposite. We did that for nine APIs, from each vendor's own pricing page and documentation. Where a rival is cheaper than us, the table says so, and for plain HTML that is most of them.

If you are pricing one vendor in depth, our teardowns of ScrapingBee pricing and Firecrawl pricing work every tier through the multipliers, and the web scraping API pricing breakdown covers billing rules such as rollover and failed requests. Leaving Firecrawl on cost grounds specifically? Our Firecrawl alternatives comparison is the shortlist.

CRAWL RENDER JS EXTRACT MARKDOWN JSON

Any URL in LLM-ready data out

robots.txt respected public data only

Why it works

Three reasons the cheapest plan is rarely the cheapest bill

Credits are not pages

ScraperAPI Hobby is 100,000 credits for $49. With rendering on, that is 10,000 pages, or $4.90 per 1,000. ScrapingBee Hobby looks like the bargain of the category at $19 for 75,000 credits, and it is 15,000 rendered pages at $1.27 per 1,000. Firecrawl is the exception that proves the rule: a credit really is a page there, until you ask for structured JSON, which adds 4 credits and makes a typed page cost five times the headline rate. Divide by the multiplier you will actually use before comparing anything.

The entry plan is the worst value on every ladder

Price per unit falls steeply as plans grow, and the first rung is always the most expensive way to buy. ZenRows Launch L2 at $99 buys twice the credits of L1 at $69. ScrapingBee Startup at $99 buys four times the credits of Freelance at $49. ScraperAPI Startup at $149 is more than three times cheaper per credit than Hobby at $49. If your volume is anywhere near the boundary, the bigger plan is usually the cheaper bill, and buying the smallest plan to save money is how teams overpay.

Your rendered share decides the winner

At $99, ScrapingBee Startup buys 1,000,000 credits and we sell 250,000 pages. If fewer than 75 percent of your pages need a browser, ScrapingBee returns more pages for the money; above that, we do. Against ZenRows Launch L2 the break-even is 25 percent rendered, and against Scrapfly Pro it is 60 percent. Count how many of your target URLs come back empty without JavaScript before you pick a vendor, because that one ratio moves the cheapest option more than any discount.

What it handles

Any URL in, clean structured data out

Point ClawEngine at a public page and it crawls, renders the JavaScript and extracts clean markdown or typed JSON in one call. Define a schema for structured fields, and respect robots.txt and Terms of Service by default.

Dollars per 1,000 rendered pages for nine APIs at three monthly budgets
What one million rendered pages a month really costs on each vendor
The plain HTML floor, where we are the expensive option and say so
The break-even rendered share against ScrapingBee, ZenRows and Scrapfly
Which billing rules quietly raise a cheap plan, from 404 charges to JSON surcharges
When a cheap scraper API is the wrong purchase and what to buy instead

POST /v1/extract extraction result

200 · JSON

{
  "url": "https://example.com/products/atlas",
  "title": "Atlas Field Notebook",
  "markdown": "# Atlas Field Notebook\n\nDurable...",
  "data": {
    "name": "Atlas Field Notebook",
    "price": 24.00,
    "currency": "USD",
    "rating": 4.7
  },
  "links": [ "/products", "/cart" ],
  "metadata": { "rendered": true }
}

JS rendered · boilerplate stripped ✓ robots.txt respected

Head to head

What 1,000 rendered pages cost at every budget, nine scraping APIs

Rendered means JavaScript executed, on a normal public site, without premium proxies. Monthly billing unless marked. Every figure was read from each vendor pricing page and documentation in September 2026, never from a review aggregator. We lose the plain HTML column outright.

Swipe to compare all columns →

API	Around $50 a month	Around $100 a month	Around $400 to $600 a month	1,000,000 rendered pages a month	Plain HTML floor
Scrapfly	$30 Discovery: 33,333 rendered pages, $0.90 per 1,000	$100 Pro: 166,666 rendered, $0.60	$500 Enterprise: 916,666 rendered, $0.55	Just beyond the $500 plan. Custom plans start at $1,200	$0.10 per 1,000 on Pro
ScrapingBee	$49 Freelance: 50,000 rendered, $0.98	$99 Startup: 200,000 rendered, $0.50	$599 Business+: 1,600,000 rendered, $0.37	$599 on Business+	$0.07 per 1,000 on Business+
ClawEngine (us)	$49 Hobby: 50,000 pages, $0.98	$99 Startup: 250,000 pages, $0.40	$399 Scale: 1,500,000 pages, $0.27	$399 on Scale, $332.50 a month billed yearly	Same rate as rendered. We lose this column
ZenRows	$39 Build B3: 24,000 rendered, $1.63	$99 Launch L2: 100,000 rendered, $0.99	$399 Growth G3: 600,000 rendered, $0.67	$549 on Scale S1	$0.08 per 1,000 on Scale S3
Zyte API	Pay as you go: $1.01 per 1,000 rendered on its easiest tier, $16.08 on its hardest	A $100 commitment takes 25 percent off every rate	A $500 commitment takes about 52 percent off: $0.48 rendered on easy sites	About $480 if every site is its Simple tier, over $7,000 if they are Advanced	$0.13 per 1,000 pay as you go, about $0.06 committed. The category floor
Firecrawl	$19 Hobby: 5,000 pages, $3.80	$99 Standard: 100,000 pages, $0.99	$399 Growth: 500,000 pages, $0.80	$749 on Scale, $599 billed yearly	Same rate as rendered. Structured JSON costs five times as much
ScraperAPI	$49 Hobby: 10,000 rendered, $4.90	$149 Startup: 100,000 rendered, $1.49	$475 Scaling: 500,000 rendered, $0.95	$975 on Professional	$0.10 per 1,000 on Business
Oxylabs	$49 Micro. Rendered results cost $0.95 to $1.35 per 1,000, the top of the band on small plans	$99 Starter, same rendered band	$249 Advanced, rendered near $0.95	Roughly $950 to $1,350 at the published rendered rates	$0.70 to $1.15 per 1,000 for ordinary sites, from $0.25 on Amazon
Bright Data	$1.50 per 1,000 records pay as you go	$1.50 per 1,000 pay as you go	$499 Scale: 384,000 records, then $1.30 per 1,000	About $1,300	Same per-record rate, billed only on successful delivery

Why ClawEngine

One API that crawls, renders and extracts

Not a raw HTML dump, not a headless browser fleet to run, and not a brittle parser to maintain. One call crawls a public page, renders its JavaScript and returns clean markdown or typed JSON, built for RAG pipelines and AI agents.

LLM-ready output

Clean markdown or typed JSON with the boilerplate stripped, so the data drops straight into a vector store, a prompt or an agent without a cleanup step.

JavaScript rendered

Each page loads in a real browser environment before extraction, so single-page apps and client-rendered content come back complete, not as an empty shell.

Compliance-first

ClawEngine works on public, permitted data only. It respects robots.txt and site Terms of Service and honors crawl-delay, so responsible scraping is the default.

Code examples

One rendered page, one unit of allowance

The multiplier tables exist because rendering, proxies and extraction are sold as separate add-ons to one fetch. Here the same crawl renders JavaScript and returns typed fields, and every page returned counts once against the plan, whatever it took to render.

curl Crawl a catalog section and return typed JSON (POST /v1/crawl)

curl https://clawengine.ai/v1/crawl \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $CLAWENGINE_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://example.com/catalog",
    "limit": 200,
    "render": true,
    "format": "structured",
    "schema": {
      "name": "string",
      "price": "string",
      "in_stock": "boolean"
    }
  }'

# 200 rendered, typed pages = 200 pages of allowance.
# On Scale that is about $0.053. No render or JSON surcharge.

Cheapest web scraping API: the questions buyers ask

What is the cheapest web scraping API?

For plain HTML, Zyte is the cheapest at $0.13 per 1,000 requests pay as you go and about $0.06 with a $500 monthly commitment, with ZenRows, ScrapingBee and Scrapfly close behind at $0.07 to $0.10 on their larger plans. For JavaScript-rendered pages, Scrapfly Discovery is cheapest around $30 to $50 a month at $0.90 per 1,000, and ClawEngine is cheapest from $99 up at $0.40, falling to $0.27 on Scale.

What is the cheapest reliable scraping API for high-volume use?

At one million rendered pages a month, ClawEngine Scale is the lowest published price at $399, followed by Zyte at about $480 if every target is its easiest tier, ZenRows Scale S1 at $549 and ScrapingBee Business+ at $599. Reliable matters here: at that volume, check concurrency and whether failed requests are billed, because a plan that bills 404s and retries costs more than its list price on any URL list with dead links in it.

How much does a web scraping API cost per 1,000 requests?

Between $0.06 and $5 for most workloads, and the spread is almost entirely rendering. A plain request costs $0.06 to $0.50 per 1,000 depending on plan size. A JavaScript-rendered request costs $0.27 to $4.90. Requests through residential or stealth proxies cost about $2 to $19 per 1,000. Work out which of those three buckets your pages fall into before comparing plan prices.

Is there an affordable scraper API for JavaScript sites?

Yes, but only on plans where rendering is not a large multiplier. Firecrawl and ClawEngine both count a rendered page as one unit, so Firecrawl Standard is $0.99 per 1,000 billed monthly and ClawEngine Startup is $0.40. On credit APIs, ScrapingBee Startup at $0.50 and Scrapfly Pro at $0.60 are the affordable options. ScraperAPI is the expensive one here at $1.49 on Startup, because rendering costs 10 credits.

Is a cheap scraper API reliable?

Price and reliability are mostly independent on public, unprotected sites, where every serious vendor returns the page. They diverge on defended targets: the cheap rate is the datacenter rate, and the moment a site blocks it you pay 10 to 75 credits per request for premium or stealth proxies. A cheap plan is reliable if your targets are open. If they are not, price the premium rate, because that is your real rate.

Is it cheaper to build your own scraper?

Only for plain HTML at high volume, or if you already run the infrastructure. Open-source Crawl4AI and Scrapy cost nothing to license, but headless browsers, proxy rotation, retries and cleaning the output are code you run and maintain. For a team without spare platform engineers, one day a month of maintenance costs more than a $99 plan, before counting servers.

Which is cheaper, ScrapingBee or ScraperAPI?

ScrapingBee, for almost every workload. Both charge 1 credit for a plain fetch, but rendering is 5 credits on ScrapingBee and 10 on ScraperAPI, and ScrapingBee sells credits more cheaply at every comparable price. A rendered page is $0.50 per 1,000 on ScrapingBee Startup at $99 against $1.49 on ScraperAPI Startup at $149. ScraperAPI is competitive on its dedicated Amazon and Walmart endpoints.

How much does JavaScript rendering add to scraping costs?

Five to ten times the plain rate on credit-based APIs. Rendering costs 5 credits on ScrapingBee and ZenRows, 6 on Scrapfly and 10 on ScraperAPI, and Zyte charges roughly eight times its HTTP rate for a browser request. Firecrawl and ClawEngine do not charge extra for rendering, which is why they look expensive on plain HTML and cheap on modern sites.

Good questions

Questions about Cheapest web scraping API

Hobby at $49 a month covers about 50,000 pages, Startup at $99 about 250,000 and Scale at $399 about 1,500,000, with JavaScript rendering included on all three. Paying yearly costs ten monthly payments, which brings the effective rate to $0.82, $0.33 and $0.22 per 1,000 pages. Structured schema extraction starts on Startup, so if you need typed JSON rather than markdown, Startup is the first plan that fits.

No. There is no free plan, and we would rather price the paid plans honestly than subsidize a free tier with the paid ones. You can run the live extraction console on this page against a real URL to see the output before you buy, and the plans are monthly, so the smallest commitment is one month of Hobby.

No. The page allowance resets every month, on yearly billing as well as monthly. That is the same rule most credit-based vendors use, and it is the reason to size the plan to your typical month rather than your busiest one, then move up a plan in the months that need it.

No, and this is the most important limit on the page. We do not defeat anti-bot systems, logins or paywalls, and we do not run a residential proxy pool. If your targets sit behind Cloudflare challenges or DataDome, ScrapingBee stealth, ScraperAPI ultra premium or Zyte on its harder tiers are what you need, and they cost several dollars per 1,000 pages for a reason.

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Point ClawEngine at a public page and one call crawls, renders the JavaScript and extracts clean markdown or typed JSON, ready for your RAG pipeline or AI agent. Public, permitted data only.

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Crawl · render JS · extract markdown & JSON · robots.txt respected, public data only