Best Scraping APIs

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✓ last verified 2026-10-02 · every figure read from the provider’s live pricing page on that date · how we verify

A scraping API replaces your proxy pool, browser farm and retry logic with one endpoint billed per successful request. Verified entries run $19–$29/mo, with per-request cost the real comparison metric: $0.06–$0.25 per 1,000 credits verified across tiers.

The verified table

SERP APIs: the search-results branch of this market

A large share of scraping-API demand is really SERP data — rank tracking, share-of-voice measurement, AI Overview monitoring, ad verification. A SERP API takes a query plus location and device, executes the search, and returns the results page as structured JSON instead of HTML you parse yourself. That structured output, per-search billing, and engine coverage are what separate the dedicated vendors (SerpApi and similar) from the general APIs in the table above.

Where the general APIs fit: ScrapingBee ships a dedicated Google search endpoint on its normal credit pricing (verified $19/mo entry), and Scrape.do fetches result pages at its standard per-success rates (verified $0.06–$0.11 per 1,000 credits) leaving parsing to you. We have not yet verified any dedicated SERP vendor’s current tiers — their pages are JS-rendered — so this section compares what we can prove and names the gap. Related: SerpApi alternatives.

How to actually compare scraping APIs

Three numbers decide it, none of them the sticker price. Effective cost per successful request on your targets, after credit multipliers — JS rendering or premium proxies can consume 5–75× base credits. Success rate on your hardest target, which only a free-tier test reveals. And concurrency limits, which cap real throughput regardless of how many credits you hold. Every provider in the table has a no-card evaluation path; an afternoon of testing beats any comparison table, including this one.

Picks by scenario

• Scrape.do — cheapest verified per-request: $0.11/1k entry → $0.06/1k at scale, success-only billing.
• ScrapingBee — the stable default: verified $19/mo entry (75k credits), mature docs, Google endpoint included.
• Apify — buy it for the platform (actors, scheduling, storage) — verified from $19/mo with a $5 free tier.
• ScraperAPI — shortlist pending pricing verification (JS-rendered page) — compare at checkout.
• Zyte — managed extraction tier; verification pending.

Ranked by verified pricing and published terms; independent performance benchmarking is on the roadmap and will change these rankings when it lands. No sponsored placement, ever.

FAQ

What’s the cheapest scraping API in 2026?

On verified rates (2026-10-02): Scrape.do — $29/mo for 250k successful credits, $0.06/1k at its Advanced tier. ScrapingBee’s equivalent entry is $49/mo for the same nominal credits.

Scraping API or proxies — which should I buy?

APIs win on hostile targets (success-only billing absorbs retries) and when you don’t want infra. Raw proxies win on high-success, high-bandwidth workloads — per-GB beats per-request there. Many teams run both.

Do credit multipliers make advertised prices misleading?

Yes — JS rendering and premium proxy modes consume 5–75× credits per request under published multiplier tables. Compare effective cost on your workload, not sticker credits. Multiplier tables are queued for the dataset.

What does SERP API stand for?

Search Engine Results Page API — a service that fetches a Google (or Bing, etc.) results page for a query and returns it as structured JSON: positions, titles, URLs, ads, AI Overview presence. SERP is the results page itself; the API is the machine-readable pipe into it.

Is using a SERP API legal?

Scraping public search results sits in the same legal frame as other public-data scraping: lawful in general, with risk concentrated in access-control bypass and terms-of-service disputes rather than criminal law. The API vendor absorbs the operational blocking problem, not your compliance obligations — nothing changes about what you may do with the data.

Is there a free SERP API?

Free tiers, not free services, and they are evaluation-sized: Scrape.do includes 1,000 successful credits with no card, ScrapingBee gives 1,000 trial credits, and Apify’s free plan carries $5 of monthly platform usage (verified 2026-10-02). Dedicated SERP vendors also run small free tiers that change too often for us to quote unverified.

SERP API vs general scraping API — which do I need?

A dedicated SERP API returns parsed, structured search results per query and prices per search; a general scraping API returns raw or rendered HTML from any URL and prices per request. If your workload is search results at scale, structured output usually justifies the premium; for everything else the general API is cheaper and more flexible.