Best ScrapingBee alternative with no monthly credits (2026)

ScrapingBee is a scraping API in the classic shape. You send it a URL, it fetches the page through its own proxies with a headless browser if you ask for one, and it sends back the HTML. It handles the rotation and the retries, it can take a screenshot or pull fields out with extraction rules, and it has dedicated endpoints for Google, Amazon, Walmart, and as of this week Shopee. It's a well-run product with a lot of documentation behind it, and at scale it's one of the cheapest in the category.

The bill is where it gets complicated. ScrapingBee sells monthly credit bundles, and a request costs a different number of credits depending on how you configured it. Turn on JavaScript rendering, which is the default, and a page is 5 credits. Turn on premium proxies and it's 25. Stealth proxies, 75. So the $99 plan is a million credits, and that's 200,000 rendered pages or 13,000 stealth ones, and the credits you don't spend by the end of the month don't carry over.

Here's where ScrapingBee is the right buy, where paying per request wins, and the volume where the answer flips.

Where ScrapingBee is strong

ScrapingBee earns its place when you want the HTML and you fetch a lot of it.

• 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, or 410, 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.

If that's you, ScrapingBee is a fine choice. The rest of this post is for the other case.

Where AnyAPI wins

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.

Nothing expires, and one page is one price

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 plainly in a tooltip: credits are valid for one month, and leftovers aren't rolled over.

A rendered page is 5 credits, so the real price per page depends on which bundle you're in. On Hobby it's $1.27 per 1,000. On Freelance, $0.98. Paying per request is $0.70 per 1,000 rendered pages on every day of the month, with no bundle to fill.

That chart assumes you use every credit. Most people don't. Here's the same comparison as a monthly bill, with ScrapingBee on the smallest plan that fits the month's pages.

The crossover is about 140,000 rendered pages a month. Under it, the plan costs more than the pages. Over it, ScrapingBee is cheaper per page, as long as the 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.

The multipliers don't apply

The sites you most want an API for are the ones that block, and on ScrapingBee those are the ones that cost the most. Premium proxies are 25 credits with rendering, stealth proxies 75. On the Freelance plan that's $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, which is exactly the case where you'd reach for stealth.

AnyAPI's page scraper has four providers behind it. The cheapest, at $0.70 per 1,000, takes the call first, and when it's blocked the request goes to the next one, up to a $1.50 per 1,000 provider that specializes in hard sites. You pay the price of the provider that answered, and a call that fails everywhere is free.

Markdown back, or the data itself

ScrapingBee gives you HTML. AnyAPI's web.scrape gives you the page's main content as markdown with the title and metadata, which is what you'd want to hand to a model or store as text. And for the platforms people scrape most, there's a dedicated endpoint that returns fields: an Instagram profile at $1.20 per 1,000, a TikTok profile at $1.20, a LinkedIn company at $1.43, a Reddit search at $0.45, a Google results page at $0.90, an Amazon product at $1.00.

One call, and what it cost

Here's a page fetched 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

On the eight-page test below, ScrapingBee's rendered median was 2.2 seconds and AnyAPI's 1.5, so the two are close, and ScrapingBee is quicker on plain pages it fetches without a browser.

The same eight pages through ScrapingBee, ScraperAPI, and AnyAPI

Eight pages, three rounds each, on September 13, 2026, with JavaScript rendering on for all three services and the standard proxy tier on both credit vendors: 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. 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 it does: five credits a rendered page, every time, and a fast, unbilled failure on the site it couldn't reach. Three things in the table decide the choice.

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; getting through would mean 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 provider missed it every time and the next one answered every time, for $0.001 a page instead of $0.0007. Same job, no setting to change.

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 were 105 credits on ScrapingBee were 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 here, 2.2 on ScrapingBee, 13 on ScraperAPI rendered, but that's the subtext; the credit table is the bill.

A 404 is billed on both credit vendors. Amazon answered the product URL with a 404 for both, and both charged for it, 5 credits on each. AnyAPI's provider got a 200 with a "Continue shopping" wall and charged $0.0007. Nobody got the product. If Amazon is the job, the Amazon product endpoint at $1.00 per 1,000 is the call to make, not a page fetch.

Other ScrapingBee alternatives worth a look

ScrapingBee's closest rivals sell the same thing, HTML back through someone else's proxies, on the same credit-bundle model with different multipliers. These are the ones that publish a usable number, read from their pricing pages on September 13, 2026, at the entry paid tier with every credit used.

ZenRows is the closest match in shape: a monthly credit bundle where rendering costs 5 credits and a premium proxy 10, so a rendered page on the $19 plan is $2.11 per 1,000. Two things it does that ScrapingBee doesn't: unused credits roll over for a month, and the free tier is 5,000 credits every month rather than once. Its pricing page shows the annual price until you click Monthly, so the $16 you'll see first is the yearly rate.

Scrapfly is the cheapest rendered page in this table on a plan, at $0.90 per 1,000 on $30 a month, and it lets you cap what any request can spend with a cost_budget parameter. Its anti-bot layer is free when the site isn't blocking and unpriced when it is, which is the part you'd want a number for. Residential proxies with rendering are 30 credits, or $4.50 per 1,000.

Zyte API prices per request by how hard Zyte rates the site, from $0.13 per 1,000 for a simple page to $1.27 for an advanced one, and $1.01 to $16.08 with a browser. No plan, no minimum, failures free. It's the best buy for easy sites at volume and the worst for a hard one, and you don't choose the tier, Zyte does.

ScrapingAnt is $19 for 100,000 credits with 10,000 free every month, plain pages at $0.19 per 1,000 and rendered at $1.90. Its multiplier table is the steepest here: a rendered page through a residential proxy is 125 credits, or $23.75 per 1,000.

Crawlbase is the one with a balance that never expires, on a ladder that starts at $3.00 per 1,000 and falls to $0.50 at a million, alongside a $99 plan. Residential proxies and CAPTCHA handling are in every request, and a site's difficulty tier multiplies the price by up to 20.

Bright Data's Web Unlocker and Oxylabs are the enterprise pair. Bright Data is $1.50 per 1,000 whether or not the page needs a browser, with 5,000 free a month and unlimited concurrency, so below that volume it's free and above it it's the dearest plain page in the table. 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.

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.

ScrapingBee vs paying per request, at a glance

Limitations and tradeoffs

Steady volume past 140,000 pages a month, and you want HTML? Stay on ScrapingBee. Its Startup and Business plans are the cheapest rendered page in this post, and its extraction rules and store endpoints are good.

Volume that varies, markdown output, or data from platforms? Pay per request. You never size a bundle, a quiet month is $0, and a blocked site costs you a slightly dearer provider rather than a 75-credit multiplier.

Two limits on AnyAPI's side. The page scraper returns markdown and metadata rather than raw HTML or a screenshot, so if your parser needs the DOM, ScrapingBee is the right input. And the endpoint page shows 93.9% uptime over the last 30 days after fallback, which means some pages still block every provider.

For the head-to-head with ScrapingBee's closest rival, see ScrapingBee vs ScraperAPI, tested. For the whole field on one job, 7 Apify alternatives on real per-request cost, and for a page-to-markdown crawler, the best Firecrawl alternative.

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