5 September 2026 · Search & Scraping · 5 min read
I was sizing a scraping job for a RAG ingestion pipeline — 100,000 pages a month, plain HTML, no JavaScript rendering needed — and ran the three obvious options through their actual pricing pages instead of picking the one with the best landing page. ScraperAPI comes out to $0.49 per 1,000 pages. Firecrawl is $0.83. Bright Data's pay-as-you-go Web Unlocker lands around $2.00. Same 100,000 pages, a $151-a-month gap between the cheapest and the most expensive — and the cheapest one is not always the right call.
Every scraping API prices itself in credits, which makes providers hard to compare until you convert everything to dollars per page. Here's what each one actually charges, pulled from their own pricing pages:
| Provider | Plan | Included | $ / 1,000 pages |
|---|---|---|---|
| ScraperAPI | Hobby, $49/mo | ~100,000 credits (1/page) | $0.49 |
| Firecrawl | Standard, $83/mo | ~100,000 credits (~1/page) | $0.83 |
| Bright Data | Web Unlocker, pay-as-you-go | no monthly minimum | ~$2.00 |
ScraperAPI's Hobby tier is priced almost exactly for this job: $49/mo buys ~100,000 credits and a plain request is 1 credit, so it lands right at $0.49/1,000 pages. Firecrawl's $83/mo Standard plan covers the same volume but costs 69% more per page. Bright Data has no plan to size here at all — its Web Unlocker is pure pay-as-you-go at roughly $1–3 per 1,000 successful requests, so at 100,000 pages you're paying for exactly what you use, around $200/month at the midpoint of that range.
The extra $0.34 per 1,000 pages on Firecrawl isn't overhead — it's buying you something ScraperAPI doesn't return. ScraperAPI hands back raw HTML; you still write and maintain a parser for every site layout, and that parser breaks every time a site redesigns its markup. Firecrawl's /scrape and /crawl endpoints return clean markdown built specifically to be chunked and embedded for retrieval-augmented generation. If the job is RAG ingestion, the $0.34 premium is cheaper than the engineering hours spent writing and re-writing HTML cleaners. If you're going to parse the HTML yourself anyway — price comparison, monitoring, structured extraction into your own schema — ScraperAPI's raw output and lower price both make more sense.
Bright Data looks like the expensive option at 100,000 plain-HTML pages, and it is. But that comparison is the wrong one for what Bright Data is built for. Its real product is the residential proxy network, billed separately by bandwidth (~$5–$15 per GB pay-as-you-go, less with a volume commitment) — the kind of thing you reach for when a target site fingerprints and blocks datacenter IPs, which is exactly where ScraperAPI's and Firecrawl's cheaper per-request pricing falls apart because your success rate collapses to near zero. At small, irregular volumes Bright Data also has no monthly floor: scrape 3,000 pages one month and 30,000 the next and you pay for exactly that, while ScraperAPI's cheapest paid tier is a flat $49/mo whether you use 1,000 credits or 100,000.
| Pages / month | ScraperAPI | Firecrawl | Bright Data (pay-as-you-go) |
|---|---|---|---|
| 3,000 (small RAG test) | $49 (Hobby floor) | $16 (Hobby plan) | ~$6–9 |
| 100,000 (steady pipeline) | $49 | $83 | ~$100–300 |
| 1,000,000 (large crawl) | $149 (Startup) | custom (Growth) | ~$1,000–3,000 |
Under 3,000 pages a month, Firecrawl's $16 Hobby plan is actually the cheapest fixed option, and pay-as-you-go Bright Data can beat it further if your volume is low and irregular — ScraperAPI has no plan sized below its $49 floor, so small jobs overpay on it by a wide margin. At real scale (1M+ pages), the two credit-based plans pull far ahead of Bright Data's per-request pricing unless you negotiate a committed-volume rate, which Bright Data offers but doesn't publish.
Test volume under ~5,000 pages a month: start on Bright Data pay-as-you-go or Firecrawl's free ~500-credit trial, and don't commit to a monthly plan yet. Steady volume in the tens of thousands, parsing HTML yourself: ScraperAPI's Hobby or Startup tier is the cheapest per page by a clear margin. Steady volume feeding a RAG pipeline: pay Firecrawl's premium for clean markdown — it's smaller than the cost of maintaining your own parser. Anything getting blocked by anti-bot systems on the other two: that's the one job Bright Data's residential network is priced for, and per-page cost stops being the deciding factor once your success rate is the actual problem.
New to usage-based pricing? Start with the free API-cost guides. For the search side of the same problem, see Bing Search API is retiring: what Brave and SerpApi actually cost instead.
Rates verified against ScraperAPI, Firecrawl and Bright Data's official pricing pages, last checked 2026-08-15. Reference estimates — credit costs per request type, volume discounts and negotiated enterprise rates vary; confirm current pricing before budgeting.