$0.13cheapest per-1k (Zyte simple HTTP)
$0.47ScrapingDog avg /1k
98.9%best success rate (Bright Data)
5xtypical JS-render multiplier
1kbiggest free credits /mo
TL;DR · cheapest by workload
- **Cheapest simple HTTP scraping, pay-as-you-go:** Zyte API, $0.13/1k requests — the lowest per-request number on the board, for straightforward pages.
- **Cheapest on average across hard targets:** ScrapingDog, ~$0.47/1k effective, and Scrape.do at ~$0.60/1k with a 98.6% success rate.
- **Cheapest predictable flat-rate for protected sites:** Bright Data, $2.50/1k flat on Walmart/Lowe's/Costco-grade targets, and the best success rate in the category (98.9%).
- **Cheapest entry plans:** Firecrawl Hobby $16/mo (5,000 pages), ZenRows from ~$16/mo (5,000 free), Decodo from $19/mo.
- **The real cost driver:** success rate. A 60%-success API costs ~67% more than its sticker price in retries — Firecrawl's 60% average in the benchmark makes its $9.59/1k effective price the story, not its $0.83/1k credit list price.
## The 2026 benchmark, in one table
Effective price per 1,000 requests and success rate across the seven hard targets, from the independent benchmark runs. List price is the vendor's published starting number.
| API | Effective /1k | Success rate | Starting price |
|---|---|---|---|
| **Zyte** | $0.13 (simple HTTP PAYG) | 91.4% | Pay-as-you-go |
| **ScrapingDog** | $0.47 | 89.1% | from $40/mo |
| **Scrape.do** | $0.60 | 98.6% | Freemium |
| **Decodo** | $0.71 | 94.2% | from $19/mo |
| **Bright Data** | $1.50 (avg) / $2.50 (hard targets, flat) | 98.9% | Pay-as-you-go |
| **ScrapingBee** | $1.77 | 96.6% | $49/mo |
| **ZenRows** | $3.32 | 96.3% | from $16/mo |
| **ScrapingAnt** | $3.56 | 68.1% | from $19/mo |
| **ScraperAPI** | $4.25 | 72.6% | $49/mo |
| **WebScrapingAPI** | $5.25 | 92.1% | Freemium |
| **ScrapegraphAI** | $5.33 | 83.8% | from $17/mo |
| **Apify** | ~$5.48 | 97.1% | Freemium ($5 credits) |
| **Oxylabs** | $7.00 | 95.4% | from $75/mo |
| **Firecrawl** | $9.59 | 60.5% | from $16/mo |
The table is the whole argument. The cheapest list price (Firecrawl's ~$0.83/1k credits, and ZenRows' and ScrapingBee's entry plans) is not the cheapest effective price, because success rate and credit multipliers dominate.
## Why success rate is a price
A scraping API that fails 40% of the time is not 40% more expensive — it is worse than that, because failures are not uniformly spread. They cluster on the exact pages you most want (the ones behind Cloudflare), and each failure costs a retry, which costs another request, which fails again. The math: a provider at 60% success needs ~1.67 requests per successful page. At 90%, ~1.11. For a pipeline that needs 100,000 good pages:
- 90% success → ~111k billed requests.
- 60% success → ~167k billed requests.
That is a 50% cost difference on the same output, before you count the engineering time spent handling the failures. Success rate is not a quality metric — it *is* the price.
## The cheapest by category
### Simple HTTP scraping at volume: Zyte
Zyte's pay-as-you-go API at **$0.13/1k simple HTTP requests** is the lowest per-request number on the board. For pages that don't need JavaScript rendering or heavy anti-bot evasion — plain static sites, documentation, public JSON — this is the cheapest thing that works, full stop. The catch is in the word "simple": add JS rendering, proxies, or extraction and the price climbs. For a pipeline that is 80% simple pages, Zyte is the floor.
### Hard-target reliability, flat and predictable: Bright Data
Bright Data is the enterprise standard — 150M+ IPs across 195 countries, and in the benchmark it hit **98.9% average success** (100% on Indeed, GitHub, Zillow, and Google) and charged a flat **$2.50/1k** on heavily protected targets like Walmart, Lowe's, and Costco regardless of complexity. Its average across everything was $1.50/1k. You pay a premium on basic pages (competitors do simple pages for $0.10–$0.20), but for protected targets it is the cheapest *working* answer — unpredictable variable rates from competitors on hard targets routinely exceed Bright Data's flat price once retries are counted.
### Best all-around value: Scrape.do and ScrapingDog
**Scrape.do** is the sweet spot for most teams: **$0.60/1k effective** with a **98.6% success rate** — near-Bright-Data reliability at a fraction of the price. Freemium to start, 110M proxies, pay only for successful requests.
**ScrapingDog** is the absolute low-cost leader at ~$0.47/1k effective (from $40/mo), with dedicated Google, Amazon, and LinkedIn endpoints and an 89% success rate across the benchmark. If your targets are the big platforms it specializes in, it undercuts everything except Zyte's simple-HTTP rate.
### Cheapest entry plans for predictable volume
If you know your monthly page count and want a flat bill:
- **Firecrawl Hobby — $16/mo** for ~5,000 pages/credits, LLM-ready Markdown output. Cheap entry, but the credit multipliers (JS rendering, JSON, Enhanced) mean the effective per-page cost at scale is far above $0.83/1k — the benchmark's $9.59/1k effective average says it plainly.
- **ZenRows — from ~$16/mo**, with 5,000 free requests to start and 96.3% success. Strong budget pick with a real free grant.
- **Decodo — from $19/mo** at ~$0.71/1k effective, 94.2% success. The quiet budget option.
- **ScrapingAnt — from $19/mo** but only 68% success in the benchmark; cheap seat, expensive retries.
### The free tiers
- **Firecrawl:** 1,000 credits/month.
- **ScrapingBee:** 1,000 credits/month.
- **ZenRows:** 5,000 free requests (one-time/startup grant).
- **Apify:** $5 in monthly credits — the whole free platform is credit-metered ($0.20/CU).
- **Scrape.do:** freemium (limited free usage).
These are enough to benchmark an API against *your* target site before paying — which is the single most important test you can run, because the benchmark's averages do not transfer to your specific domain.
## The multipliers that hide in "per 1,000"
Every scraping API has a base price and a set of multipliers that change the real cost:
- **JavaScript rendering** — typically **5x** the base credit cost.
- **Premium residential proxies** — commonly **10–25x**.
- **Structured extraction (JSON)** — 2–4x, and combined with "Enhanced" extraction the cost compounds (Firecrawl's ~9 credits/page for JSON+Enhanced is the poster child).
- **Country/geo targeting** — a surcharge per request on some providers.
A $0.47/1k API is $0.47/1k only if your pages are plain HTML. The moment your target is a React app behind Cloudflare in a specific country, the effective price can be 5–10x the headline. Budget the multiplied number.
## The bottom line
- **Cheapest per request (simple pages):** Zyte, $0.13/1k PAYG.
- **Cheapest average across hard targets:** ScrapingDog (~$0.47/1k) and Scrape.do (~$0.60/1k, 98.6% success).
- **Cheapest flat-rate for protected sites:** Bright Data, $2.50/1k, with the best success rate in the category.
- **Cheapest entry plans:** Firecrawl $16/mo, ZenRows from ~$16/mo, Decodo from $19/mo.
- **Biggest free pool:** ZenRows 5,000; Firecrawl and ScrapingBee 1,000 each.
And the rule that beats all of them: **test the API against your actual target site before buying.** Run 500 requests through the free tier or trial, count the success rate, compute the effective price per good page, and only then compare. The cheapest API on a pricing page and the cheapest API on your pipeline are rarely the same company.
## FAQ
### What is the cheapest web scraping API in 2026?
Zyte's pay-as-you-go API at $0.13/1k simple HTTP requests is the lowest per-request price. For hard-target scraping, ScrapingDog (~$0.47/1k effective) and Scrape.do (~$0.60/1k) are the cheapest on average, while Bright Data's flat $2.50/1k is the cheapest predictable option on heavily protected sites.
### Why is the cheapest scraping API not the cheapest in practice?
Success rate and credit multipliers dominate. A 60%-success API needs ~67% more billed requests per good page than a 90%-success one, and JavaScript rendering (5x), premium proxies (10–25x), and JSON extraction compound the base price. Always compute effective cost per successful page, not per request.
### Which scraping API has the best success rate?
Bright Data, at 98.9% average across the 2026 benchmark (100% on Indeed, GitHub, Zillow, and Google), followed by Scrape.do at 98.6%, Apify at 97.1%, and ScrapingBee at 96.6%. Firecrawl was the notable laggard at 60.5% average.
### What is the cheapest scraping API for AI agents?
For LLM-ready output, Firecrawl's Hobby plan ($16/mo, ~5,000 pages, Markdown/JSON output) is the cheapest entry, but budget for credit multipliers on JS-rendered pages. For price-per-successful-page on hard targets, Scrape.do and ScrapingDog beat it on cost.
### Is Firecrawl cheap for scraping?
List price is cheap ($0.83/1k credits at the $83/100k tier, $16/mo Hobby), but the effective average in the 2026 benchmark was $9.59/1k once JavaScript rendering and JSON extraction multipliers applied. It is cheap for simple scrapes and expensive for enriched, rendered pages.
### Do scraping APIs charge only for successful requests?
Most do, but it is not universal, and "successful" has fine print. Bright Data, Scrape.do, and ScrapingBee bill successful requests; credit multipliers still apply to what counts as one. Always check whether retries, partial responses, and premium proxies are billed as separate requests.