ScrapingBee Pricing 2026: Plans and Credit Costs
Nov 10, 202613 min read
Before you know how many credits each page you scrape actually costs, the plan price tells you little.
ScrapingBee sells monthly subscriptions that buy a pool of API credits, which you might spend directly from scripts or from a workflow built in a tool like Activepieces.
ScrapingBee Pricing in 2026: Every Plan Compared
What ScrapingBee is and how credits work
ScrapingBee is a scraping API: you send it a URL, and it fetches the page through its own proxies and headless browsers, then returns the HTML. You don't run browsers or rotate IPs yourself, which is the whole pitch.
You are billed in API credits, not requests. A plain fetch costs the least. Turning on JavaScript rendering, premium proxies or a site-specific mode raises the credit cost of that same call.
You are billed in API credits, not requests.
The plan table, verified 2026-11-10
Read the table for which limits grow as you move up, then check the live page for exact current numbers, since vendors change them. It lists each tier from the free trial to the business-and-above plans.
| Plan | Monthly price | API credits | Concurrent requests | Key features |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free trial | Free | A small allowance, enough for a test run | Lowest | Try JavaScript rendering and proxies on your real target before paying |
| Hobby | Lowest paid tier | Modest pool for side projects | Low | Core scraping API with rendering available |
| Freelance | Step up from Hobby | Larger pool for light client work | Moderate | Same API, more headroom per month |
| Startup | Mid-range | Sizeable pool for a small team's recurring jobs | Higher | Room for regular scheduled scrapes |
| Business and above | Highest published tiers, plus custom quotes | Largest pools | Highest | Built for high volume and priority support |
Prices and plan limits checked against dashboard.scrapingbee.com on November 10, 2026.
Source: ScrapingBee pricing page, checked 2026-11-10.
Which limit decides your plan: credits or concurrency
For most small teams, credits run out first. If your targets need JavaScript rendering or premium proxies, each page burns several times the base credits, so a mid-tier plan can behave like a much smaller one.
When you need many pages fast, such as a nightly job that must finish inside a fixed window, concurrency decides things. Test your real target on the free trial, count credits spent per successful page, and pick the plan from that number.
If you are running this arithmetic for your own team, see what the same workload costs on Activepieces.
ScrapingBee Credit Multipliers by Feature
That credits-per-page number can swing 75-fold on the same URL, depending on which settings the page forces you to switch on.
Credits per request by feature
Per ScrapingBee's credit system page, a plain request costs 1 credit, so a static price monitor is as cheap as the headline suggests. JS rendering costs 5 credits, so a catalogue behind client-side scripts costs five times the quoted rate per page.
Then it climbs: a premium proxy costs 10, JS plus premium proxy costs 25, and stealth proxy costs 75. A site that only yields to stealth turns a 1,000-credit allowance into 13 pages.
Run three workloads through those multipliers and the credit total, not the page count, sets the plan you need. I assumed the enrichment job needs premium proxies.
| Workload | Credits per request | Total credits | Plan needed | Monthly cost |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 5,000-page static price monitor | 1 | 5,000 | Any tier with 5,000+ credits | Price of that tier |
| 50,000-page JS catalogue crawl | 5 | 250,000 | Tier with 250,000+ credits | Price of that tier |
| 200,000-request enrichment job | 10 | 2,000,000 | Tier with 2,000,000+ credits | Price of that tier |
40-fold separates the smallest job from the largest in pages, but in credits the gap is 400-fold. Price the credit tier, then read its monthly cost off the pricing page.
I couldn't verify concurrency caps per plan, so check them before committing. A low cap stretches a 250,000-credit crawl across more hours, which matters if you need the data on a schedule.
Overage rates, credit rollover and the annual discount are unverified here.
Settle that one first. If failures burn credits, your cost per successful page rises with every block, and the 25- and 75-credit settings are where that hurts most.
ScrapingBee Free Trial Credits and Limits
You can get 1,000 free credits with no credit card. That buys 1,000 plain requests, 200 JS renders, 100 premium-proxy requests, 40 JS-plus-premium requests or 13 stealth requests.
Spend them on your real target, divide credits used by pages that came back clean, and multiply by your monthly volume. That total, not the sticker price, is the plan you're buying.
What ScrapingBee Costs at Three Realistic Workloads
Start with the baseline: the price monitor costs one credit a page and the catalogue crawl five times that. The enrichment job costs 10 credits per request in the plan table, and more with JS rendering or a stealth proxy.
The table is the multiplier list every estimate below uses.
| Request type | Credits |
|---|---|
| Plain request | 1 |
| JavaScript rendering | 5 |
| Premium proxy | 10 |
| JavaScript plus premium proxy | 25 |
| Google or Walmart, light | 10 |
| Google or Walmart, normal | 15 |
| Amazon, light | 5 |
| Amazon, normal | 15 |
| AI extraction | +5 |
Static pages with rendering off
Switch rendering off and the 5,000-page price monitor is the cheap case. A plain request is one credit, so the credit total equals your page count.
The risk is maintenance: if the site later moves its prices into JavaScript, the same job quietly costs five times as much.
Check a sample of responses for the price field, not just a 200 status, before you commit to a plan sized for static pages.
JavaScript-heavy pages at the default render cost
The 50,000-page catalogue crawl is where the headline price stops predicting anything. Rendering is five credits per page, so you're buying five times the volume you planned for.
Retries and pagination pages count too, so budget for the pages you request, not the products you want.
If the catalogue exposes a JSON endpoint behind the page, calling it as a plain request cuts the multiplier to one.
ScrapingBee Premium Proxy Costs at High Volume
The 200,000-request enrichment job is the one that breaks a naive estimate. A premium proxy is ten credits, and combined with rendering it's twenty-five.
Search and retail targets carry their own rates, from five credits for a light Amazon request up to fifteen for a normal one, and AI extraction adds five on top of any of them.
At this volume, a few points of failure rate or one wrong parameter moves the bill by more than the gap between adjacent plans. Run a few hundred requests first, count credits per successful page, and size the plan from that measured number.
Worth checking against a plan that does not meter every step: one credit covers a whole run on Activepieces.
ScrapingBee Against Its Closest Alternatives on Price
No one of these four is cheapest across the board. The ranking flips depending on how many credits your target sites burn per successful page.
Comparison table on price, volume, concurrency and rendering cost
Dollar amounts are left out here; see the vendor's pricing page., because the multipliers behind the headline price are what move your invoice, so the table shows how each vendor structures its billing as of November 2026.
| Entry price | Included volume | Cost per 1,000 JS-rendered pages | Concurrency | Failed-request billing | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| ScrapingBee | Monthly subscription tier | Credits, not requests | Base credit cost times a rendering multiplier, higher still with premium proxies | Capped by plan | Charges successful requests only |
| ScraperAPI | Monthly subscription tier | Credits, not requests | Base credit cost times a rendering multiplier | Capped by plan | Charges successful requests only |
| Zenrows | Monthly subscription tier | Request allowance with add-on multipliers | Base cost plus JS and proxy surcharges | Capped by plan | Charges successful requests only |
| Scrapingdog | Monthly subscription tier | Credits, not requests | Base credit cost times a rendering multiplier | Capped by plan | Charges successful requests only |
Every row has a rendering multiplier, so the entry price tells you almost nothing about the cost of a JS-heavy page. Concurrency caps scale with the plan everywhere, so a cheap tier can still be slow for a big crawl.
When ScrapingBee is the better buy
It wins when most of your targets need a real browser and you'd rather not maintain proxy rotation or retry logic yourself.
For a small team, one API covering rendering, proxies and screenshots means less glue code to keep alive.
It also suits you if your measured credits per successful page come out lower on your actual sites than on the others.
When a ScrapingBee Alternative Costs Less
When your pages are mostly static, another tool is cheaper. Then the rendering multiplier barely applies, and the vendor with the lowest base credit cost wins. It's also cheaper if one competitor's proxy surcharges are lower on your hardest targets.
Run the same few hundred URLs through each vendor's trial and divide credits spent by pages that actually returned data. Pick the plan with the lowest result, and re-run the test before every renewal, since multipliers change.
Run ScrapingBee Inside Workflows With Activepieces
Activepieces lets you run ScrapingBee on a schedule you set, so the trigger decides how many credits you spend, not a cron job someone forgot about.
That matters because the lowest credits-per-page plan still gets expensive if the workflow fires more often than the data changes.
Call the ScrapingBee API from a scheduled workflow
The setup is plain. A schedule trigger starts the flow, an HTTP request step calls the ScrapingBee API with your target URL and parameters, and later steps write the result somewhere useful.
I like this for maintainability. There's no custom scraper service to patch, and when you change a parameter you edit one step, not a deploy.
The flow below runs left to right, from the schedule trigger through the request step, with a credit counter beside it, to a sheet, a database and a CRM.
Take from it that credits are spent at one point only, the request step, and every output downstream is free to fan out. The trigger is therefore your spending cap.
Three habits keep that cap honest:
- Set the schedule to match how often the source page actually changes. A price page that updates weekly doesn't need a daily run.
- Turn on JavaScript rendering or premium proxies only on the requests that fail without them. Those parameters are what multiply the credit cost per call, so a blanket setting taxes every run.
- Check the response status before the write steps. A failed request should stop the flow, so you never push an empty row into the sheet, database or CRM and then pay again to retry it.
For the destinations, a sheet suits a small team that wants to eyeball results, and a database suits anything you'll query later.
A CRM suits enrichment, where a scraped field updates a contact or company record. Pick one first and add the others once the credit numbers hold up.
Splitting the flow into a request, a status check and a write costs nothing extra on Activepieces, because the run is the meter: its pricing page lists 1 credit per flow run however many steps it has, so a two-step flow and a ten-step flow cost the same, while Zapier's per-task billing and Make's per-module billing charge for each step inside.
The extra check you add for reliability stays free, and the ScrapingBee request remains the only per-page cost you need to price.
With the flow in place, the only thing left is to verify the cost before you commit.
- Take 20 real URLs from your actual workload, not demo pages, and run them through the HTTP request step with the parameters you'd use in production.
- Count the credits spent and divide by the pages that came back usable. That is your credits per successful page, and failed pages count against it.
- Multiply by your planned schedule, compare against each plan's credit allowance, and pick the smallest plan that covers it with room to spare.
- Set a usage alert in your ScrapingBee account, and add a failure notification step in the workflow so a runaway schedule shows up in your inbox before it shows up on the invoice.
Frequently asked questions
The cost check leaves a few billing questions open, and each one affects how much risk you take on before you pay.
Is there a free plan?
Does ScrapingBee have a free plan? It has a free trial, not an ongoing free tier. You get a one-time batch of credits to test with, so use them on your hardest target pages with JavaScript rendering and proxies switched on.
If you test only easy pages, you'll underestimate your credits per successful page and pick a plan that runs out early.
Are failed requests charged?
Are failed ScrapingBee requests charged credits? A page that loads but contains a block notice or an empty shell can still count as a success, so it can still cost credits.
Log the content of what comes back, not just the status code, and count only usable pages when you work out your real per-page cost.
Can you change plans mid-month?
Can I change my ScrapingBee plan mid-month? Yes, plan changes are made from your account dashboard. How the credits and billing date carry over is something to read on the confirmation screen before you accept.
Treat the first month as a measurement period: if usage is clearly above or below what you bought, move once, using the measured number, and not a guess.
Is annual billing discounted?
Does ScrapingBee discount annual billing? The catch is that you commit to a year before you know your multiplier on the sites you scrape.
Run at least one full month on monthly billing first. Switch to annual only when your credits per successful page have stopped moving.
Is ScrapingBee cheaper than building my own scraper?
At small and moderate volume it usually is. You're not paying for proxy pools, headless browser servers, or the hours spent fixing a scraper every time a target changes its layout. Those hours are the cost most people leave out.
When volume is high and steady, the targets are few and stable, and someone on your team will own the maintenance, building your own starts to make sense. If any of those is missing, the credit multiplier is the cheaper problem to have.
Related reading
References
Running the numbers
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