Best ScrapingBee alternative with no monthly credits (2026)

Maybe your scraper runs hard for one week a month and sits idle the rest. Maybe half your URLs are behind Cloudflare, and the only setting that gets you through costs 75 credits a page instead of 5. Either way, you're paying for credits you didn't use or for options you had to switch on.

Eight test pages went through ScrapingBee, ScraperAPI, and AnyAPI on September 13, 2026, and ScrapingBee's prices were rechecked on October 1. Here's when ScrapingBee is still the right buy for you, when paying per request wins, and the volume where the answer flips.

Where is ScrapingBee strong?

If you're writing your own parser and you fetch pages by the hundred thousand, ScrapingBee earns its place.

You send it a URL, it fetches the page through its own proxies, with a headless browser if you ask for one, and you get the HTML back. It handles the rotation and the retries, takes screenshots, pulls fields out with extraction rules, and has dedicated endpoints for Google, Amazon, Walmart, and Shopee.

It's a well-run product with a lot of documentation behind it, and if you buy at scale, it's one of the cheapest in the category.

• At volume, it's cheap. On the $99 Startup plan a plain request is $0.10 per 1,000 and a rendered one is $0.50 per 1,000. Business is $249 for three million credits, which gets a rendered page down to $0.42 per 1,000. If you fill the bundle, those are the lowest prices in this post.
• You get the raw page. HTML, a screenshot, or fields extracted with CSS rules you supply. If you're building your own parser, that's the input you want.
• It's honest about failures. ScrapingBee only bills a request that came back with a 200, 404, 410, or 413, and its auto mode tries configurations from cheapest to dearest and charges you for the one that worked, or nothing if none did.
• Dedicated endpoints for the big stores. An Amazon product is 5 credits, a Walmart search 10, a Google search 10, a Shopee product 75. Structured JSON back, no parsing.
• Concurrency comes with the plan. 25 concurrent requests on Hobby, 400 on Business+. Plenty for a crawl.

ScrapingBee cons:

• Credits expire every month
• 1 to 75 credits a request, depending on what you switch on
• Bills a 404

If you fill a Startup or Business plan every month and you want raw HTML, stay on ScrapingBee. If your volume swings, or most of your targets block, keep reading.

ScrapingBee pricing: Hobby $19 for 75,000 credits (5 credits a rendered page, and leftovers expire at month end); up to Business+ at $599 for 8,000,000

Where does paying per request win?

If your volume isn't steady, if you'd rather have markdown than HTML, or if the sites you want are the ones where 1 credit becomes 75, a flat price per page is simpler and usually cheaper.

What does a rendered page cost on each plan?

A credit is ScrapingBee's unit of spend, and what a request costs depends on how you set it up.

JavaScript rendering, which is on by default, means a real browser loads the page. Anything drawn by scripts shows up, like a store price that loads after the HTML.

That costs 5 credits. Premium proxies make it 25, and stealth proxies 75.

So the $99 plan's million credits is 200,000 rendered pages or 13,000 stealth ones, and whatever you don't spend by the end of the month doesn't carry over.

ScrapingBee's pricing is five bundles: Hobby at $19 for 75,000 credits, Freelance at $49 for 250,000, Startup at $99 for a million, Business at $249 for three million, and Business+ at $599 for eight million.

The page says it in a tooltip: credits are valid for one month, and leftovers aren't rolled over.

A rendered page is 5 credits, so what you really pay per page depends on your bundle: $1.27 per 1,000 on Hobby, $0.98 on Freelance.

Paying per request, you pay $0.70 per 1,000 rendered pages on every day of the month, with no bundle to fill.

Those rates assume you use every credit, and most months you won't. Here's the same comparison as a monthly bill, with ScrapingBee on the smallest plan that fits your month's pages.

The crossover is about 141,428 rendered pages a month. Under it, you're paying for a plan bigger than your month.

Over it, ScrapingBee is cheaper per page, as long as your volume holds. A month at 20,000 pages on the $49 plan is $2.45 per 1,000, three and a half times the flat rate.

What do hard sites cost?

The sites you most want an API for are the ones that block, and on ScrapingBee those cost you the most. Premium proxies are 25 credits with rendering, stealth proxies 75: on the Freelance plan, $4.90 and $14.70 per 1,000 pages.

In a test of both raw-HTML APIs in June, ScrapingBee's standard tier got through a Cloudflare-protected page zero times in six tries. That's exactly when you'd reach for stealth.

AnyAPI's page scraper uses fallback, which just means a second try somewhere else. It has four sources: the cheapest, at $0.70 per 1,000, takes your call first, and when it's blocked the request goes to the next one.

A page is billed at the price of the source that returned it, never more than $1.50 per 1,000, and a page every source fails on is free.

Do you want the page, or the data on it?

Want the page? Both give it to you as HTML or Markdown: ScrapingBee with its return_page_markdown option, AnyAPI's web.scrape with formats, plus the title and metadata.

ScrapingBee also takes screenshots and runs your CSS extraction rules, which AnyAPI's page scraper doesn't.

If you want the data on a platform people scrape a lot, you can skip the page. AnyAPI has a dedicated endpoint that returns fields, no parsing: an Instagram profile at $1.00 per 1,000, a TikTok profile at $0.40, a LinkedIn company at $1.10, a Reddit search at $0.35, a Google results page at $0.50, an Amazon product at $0.90.

What does one call look like?

Here's what a page costs you the pay-per-request way: one of ScrapingBee's own blog posts, rendered, as markdown, for $0.0007 in 2.8 seconds on September 11, 2026.

curl https://api.getanyapi.com/v1/run/web.scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $ANYAPI_KEY" \
  -d '{"url": "https://www.scrapingbee.com/blog/web-scraping-101-with-python/", "formats": ["markdown"]}'

import os, requests

r = requests.post(
    "https://api.getanyapi.com/v1/run/web.scrape",
    headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {os.environ['ANYAPI_KEY']}"},
    json={"url": "https://www.scrapingbee.com/blog/web-scraping-101-with-python/", "formats": ["markdown"]},
)
body = r.json()
print(body["costUsd"], body["output"]["data"]["title"])
# 0.0007 Python Web Scraping Tutorial for 2026 with Examples & Best Practices

const r = await fetch("https://api.getanyapi.com/v1/run/web.scrape", {
  method: "POST",
  headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.ANYAPI_KEY}` },
  body: JSON.stringify({ url: "https://www.scrapingbee.com/blog/web-scraping-101-with-python/", formats: ["markdown"] }),
});
const { costUsd, output } = await r.json();
console.log(costUsd, output.data.markdown.length > 0); // 0.0007 true

If you're choosing on speed, it barely matters. In the eight-page test, ScrapingBee's rendered median was 2.2 seconds and AnyAPI's 1.5, and ScrapingBee is quicker on plain pages it fetches without a browser.

What happened on the same eight pages?

Eight pages, three rounds each, went through all three services on September 13, 2026: a static page, two scraping sandboxes, the Hacker News front page, an e-commerce sandbox, an Amazon product page, a G2 review page behind Cloudflare, and a Best Buy search.

JavaScript rendering was on everywhere, with the standard proxy tier on both credit vendors. A call counted only when the page's own text came back.

AnyAPI's column is two runs, so 48 calls.

ScrapingBee did what its docs say: five credits a rendered page, every time, and a fast, unbilled failure on the site it couldn't reach. Three results decide the choice for you.

The Cloudflare page is the whole argument for fallback. ScrapingBee's standard tier got a 500 from G2 every time and, to its credit, charged nothing. To get through, you'd need its stealth proxy at 75 credits a page.

ScraperAPI got through once in three at 30 credits and spent 29 seconds failing the other two.

AnyAPI's cheapest source missed it every time and the next one answered every time, for $0.001 a page instead of $0.0007, and you don't change a setting.

Rendering is where ScraperAPI's credits go. A rendered page cost 10 credits on the sandboxes and 20 on the static page and the Best Buy search. So the same 24 calls that cost you 105 credits on ScrapingBee cost 265 on ScraperAPI, and two of them never came back inside two minutes.

ScrapingBee's rendered pages were 5 credits every time, which matches the June test. Speed followed the same order, 1.5 seconds on AnyAPI, 2.2 on ScrapingBee, 13 on ScraperAPI rendered, but if you're choosing on cost, the credits are the bill.

A 404 is billed on both credit vendors. Amazon answered the product URL with a 404 for both, and both charged 5 credits for a page you didn't get.

AnyAPI's source got a 200 with a "Continue shopping" wall, and AnyAPI charged $0.0007 for it.

Nobody got the product. If you're after Amazon products, the Amazon product endpoint at $0.90 per 1,000 is the call to make, not a page fetch.

Which commonly scraped sites get through without premium proxies?

Eight pages is a small test. So on October 1, 2026, 23 of the URLs people most often try to scrape went through AnyAPI's page scraper, one fetch per site, one call at a time: stores, property and job sites, review sites, social profiles, a paywalled news article, a Cloudflare test page, and Wikipedia as a control.

A call counted only when the page's own content was in the text, so a captcha or a paywall preview that came back as a 200 was a miss.

20 of the 23 sites came back with the real page. The median call took 4.6 seconds, and every page came back inside 10. The 23 calls cost $0.0237: the two errors were free, and the paywall preview cost $0.0015.

ScrapingBee's standard tier failed the G2 page every time in September, and the fix it sells is premium or stealth proxies, $4.90 or $14.70 per 1,000 on Freelance. Here G2, Amazon, Zillow, and Instagram came back at $0.00125 or $0.0015 a call with no setting to change.

Which other ScrapingBee alternatives are worth a look?

If you like ScrapingBee's model but not its price or its multipliers, its closest rivals sell the same thing: HTML back through someone else's proxies, on credit bundles with different multipliers. These are page reads, not runs, from their pricing pages on September 13, 2026, at the entry paid tier with every credit used.

If you like the credit model and only hate losing credits at month end, ZenRows is the closest match.

Rendering costs 5 credits and a premium proxy 10. But unused credits roll over for a month, and you get 5,000 free credits every month rather than once.

Skip it if rendered pages are most of your bill: on the $19 plan they're $2.11 per 1,000. Its pricing page shows the annual price until you click Monthly, so the $16 you'll see first is the yearly rate.

ZenRows pricing: 5,000 free credits a month; $19 for 45,000 credits (rendering is 5 credits a page; unused credits roll over one month)

If you want the cheapest rendered page on a plan, Scrapfly is the pick, at $0.90 per 1,000 on $30 a month. It also lets you cap what any request can spend with a cost_budget parameter.

Skip it if your targets block hard and you need to know the price first. Its anti-bot layer is free when the site isn't blocking and unpriced when it is.

Scrapfly pricing: 1,000 free credits; $30 for 200,000 credits a month (residential proxies with rendering are 30 credits, or $4.50 per 1,000, and the anti-bot price on a blocking site isn't published)

If your sites are easy and your volume is high, Zyte API is the best buy here.

It prices each request by how hard Zyte rates the site. A simple page is $0.13 per 1,000 and an advanced one $1.27, or $1.01 to $16.08 with a browser.

No plan, no minimum, failures free. The catch: you don't choose the tier, Zyte does, so on a hard site it's the worst buy in the table.

Zyte API pricing: $5 free for 30 days, then per request ($0.13 to $16.08 per 1,000, set by how hard Zyte rates the site)

If you want a free tier you can build on, ScrapingAnt gives you 10,000 credits every month. Paid starts at $19 for 100,000, with plain pages at $0.19 per 1,000 and rendered at $1.90.

Skip it if your sites block, because its multiplier table is the steepest here: a rendered page through a residential proxy is 125 credits, or $23.75 per 1,000.

ScrapingAnt pricing: 10,000 free credits a month; $19 for 100,000 (125 credits a page with rendering and a residential proxy)

If expiring credits are what you're leaving ScrapingBee over, Crawlbase has a balance that never expires.

Its ladder starts at $3.00 per 1,000 and falls to $0.50 at a million, alongside a $99 plan. Residential proxies and CAPTCHA handling come with every request.

The catch: if a site is hard, its difficulty tier multiplies what you pay by up to 20.

Crawlbase pricing: 5,000 free requests; a balance from $3.00 per 1,000, falling to $0.50 at a million (hard sites cost up to 20 times more); or $99 for 200,000 a month

Bright Data's Web Unlocker and Oxylabs are the enterprise pair.

If you fetch under 5,000 pages a month, Bright Data costs you nothing. Above that it's $1.50 per 1,000 whether or not the page needs a browser, the dearest plain page in the table, with unlimited concurrency.

If you mostly fetch Amazon, Oxylabs is a monthly results plan from $49, with Amazon pages at $0.50 per 1,000 and everything else at $1.15. The best Bright Data alternative covers that side of the market.

Bright Data Web Unlocker pricing: 5,000 a month free, then $1.50 per 1,000 (failures are free unless you set your own headers)

Oxylabs pricing: 2,000 free results; from $49 a month ($1.15 per 1,000 for most pages, $0.50 for Amazon)

The short version:

• Plain pages at volume: Zyte for easy sites, or Scrapfly on a plan
• A free tier you can build on: ScrapingAnt, or Bright Data's 5,000
• A balance that never expires: Crawlbase
• One price per rendered page with no bundle to fill: pay per request

ScrapingBee's other direct rival is priced in the best ScraperAPI alternative.

How do ScrapingBee and paying per request compare?

Limitations and what you give up

Steady volume past 141,428 pages a month? Stay on ScrapingBee. Its Startup and Business plans get you the cheapest rendered page in this post, and its extraction rules, screenshots, and store endpoints are good.

Volume that varies, or data from platforms? Pay per request. You never size a bundle.

A quiet month costs you $0, and a blocked site costs you a slightly dearer source rather than a 75-credit multiplier.

AnyAPI cons:

• No screenshots or extraction rules, so if you need those, ScrapingBee is the better input
• 93.9% uptime over 30 days after fallback on September 11, so some pages still block every source
• Bills a bot wall that comes back looking like a normal page

AnyAPI pricing: $0.70 per 1,000 rendered pages with no plan (a page a dearer source rescues costs up to $1.50 per 1,000; a page every source fails on is free)

Before you pay anyone, check the free tiers. If you need under 5,000 pages a month, Bright Data's free tier already covers it, and a one-off job may fit inside ScrapingBee's 1,000 free credits.

If you're weighing ScrapingBee against its closest rival, see ScrapingBee vs ScraperAPI, tested. If you want the whole field priced on one job, read 7 Apify alternatives on real per-request cost, and if you need a page-to-markdown crawler, the best Firecrawl alternative.

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