Cost by billing shape
| Plattform | Rate | Monatliche Kosten |
|---|
Same multiplier, different price per credit — plus one that isn't credits at all
ScrapingBee, ScraperAPI, and ZenRows converged on essentially the same credit-multiplier shape: 1 credit for a plain page, 5 for JavaScript rendering, roughly 25 for a premium/anti-bot-protected target. That similarity makes it easy to assume the three are interchangeable — they aren't, because the dollar price per 1,000 credits varies by more than 2x across them (ScrapingBee's entry tier works out to roughly $0.196 per 1,000 credits, ScraperAPI's to about $0.49, more than double). The multiplier tells you the relative difficulty of a request; the base rate tells you what that difficulty actually costs, and those are two separate numbers you need before picking a vendor.
Apify breaks the pattern entirely: instead of charging per request at some multiplier, it charges for the actual compute (RAM × runtime) your scraping "Actor" consumes, priced per Compute Unit (1 CU = 1 GB-hour) at roughly $0.20 on entry tiers. A simple static-page scraper might use a tiny fraction of a CU per page — cheaper than any credit-based request — while a heavy browser-automation Actor rendering JS-intensive pages could burn far more. There is no honest universal conversion rate between "one scrape" and "one Compute Unit," which is why this calculator keeps Apify's number on its own axis rather than forcing a misleading side-by-side total.
Tools und Hosting
Häufig gestellte Fragen
How do ScrapingBee, ScraperAPI, and ZenRows pricing compare?
All three bill in credits with the same rough multiplier shape — a plain HTML request costs 1 credit, JavaScript rendering costs 5 credits, and a premium/anti-bot-protected request costs roughly 25 credits — but each vendor prices those credits very differently. ScrapingBee's entry plan is about $49/month for 250,000 credits (~$0.196 per 1,000 credits), ScraperAPI's Hobby plan is $49/month for 100,000 credits (~$0.49 per 1,000 credits, over double ScrapingBee's rate), and ZenRows' Developer plan is $69/month for roughly 250,000 basic credits (~$0.276 per 1,000). Same multiplier system, meaningfully different price per credit.
Why is Apify not directly comparable to the other three?
Apify doesn't bill per request at all — it bills in Compute Units (CU), where 1 CU equals 1 GB of Actor RAM used for one hour, priced around $0.20/CU on the Free and Starter tiers (dropping to $0.16 on Scale, $0.13 on Business). Because Apify runs your scraping logic as a full program (an "Actor") rather than proxying a single request through a fixed pipeline, its cost depends on how much memory and runtime YOUR specific scraper actually consumes — a lightweight static-page Actor might cost a fraction of a credit-based request, while a heavy browser-automation Actor scraping JS-heavy pages could cost several times more. There's no reliable universal conversion between "one scrape" and "one Compute Unit" — this calculator keeps Apify's cost separate rather than forcing a false equivalence.
What counts as a "premium" or "protected" request?
Requests that need anti-bot bypass — residential/mobile proxy IPs, CAPTCHA solving, or targeting sites with aggressive bot detection (major e-commerce and social platforms are common examples). These cost roughly 25 credits on ZenRows specifically, and a similar 10-75 credit range across ScrapingBee and ScraperAPI depending on the exact target site's difficulty — this calculator uses 25 as a representative flat rate for all three, but your actual mix of easy vs. hard targets will shift the real number.
Which vendor is cheapest for my volume?
It depends entirely on how much of your traffic needs JavaScript rendering or anti-bot bypass, since all three price those the same multiplier but at different base rates. At low premium-request share, ScrapingBee's lower per-credit rate usually wins; as your mix shifts toward more JS-rendering and protected requests, the total credit volume grows fast enough that the underlying per-credit rate difference compounds — enter your own real monthly mix in the calculator above rather than assuming one vendor is always cheaper.
Do free tiers matter for a production integration?
Only for prototyping. ZenRows offers a recurring 5,000 free credits/month, ScraperAPI gives a one-time 7-day trial with 5,000 credits, and ScrapingBee offers a one-time 1,000-credit trial — none of these free allowances are meant to cover real production volume, so budget from the paid tier numbers above once you're past initial testing.