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✓ last verified 2026-10-02 · every rate below was read from ScrapingBee’s live pricing page on that date · how we verify
ScrapingBee is a mature, well-documented scraping API with JavaScript rendering, a Google search endpoint and a straightforward credit model. It is the low-risk default in this category.
Where ScrapingBee sits in the verified market
Among the 3 scraping APIs whose plans we have verified, ScrapingBee’s entry plan ($19.00/month, Hobby, 75,000 credits) is tied for cheapest with Apify’s $19.00/month Starter plan.
ScrapingBee pricing (verified 2026-10-02)
| Product | Plan | Rate | Monthly | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| scraping-api | Hobby | $19.00/mo | $19.00 | 75k credits; ex VAT |
| scraping-api | Freelance | $49.00/mo | $49.00 | 250k credits; ex VAT |
| scraping-api | Startup | $99.00/mo | $99.00 | 1M credits |
| scraping-api | Business | $249/mo | $249 | 3M credits; Business+ $599 8M credits |
Source: provider pricing page, checked 2026-10-02.
How the pricing is structured
Plans run from $49.00/month to $249/month on the published ladder. Products with verified pricing here: scraping-api.
What to know before you buy
Credits are the thing to watch, not plan price. JavaScript rendering and premium proxies consume multiple credits per request under its published multipliers, so effective cost can run far above the sticker. At list, the $19/month Hobby plan buys 75,000 credits (about $0.25 per thousand) and $49/month buys 250,000 (about $0.196 per thousand), improving to roughly $0.075 per thousand at the $599 tier.
Who it fits
ScrapingBee makes sense if you want reliable documentation, predictable behaviour and a free 1,000-credit trial with no card.
Look elsewhere if cost per successful request is the deciding metric. Verified competitors start at $29/month for the same nominal credit allowance.
Is ScrapingBee legit? What we can verify, and what we can’t
What we verified ourselves: its published pricing is real and current — we read every rate in the table above from its live pricing page on 2026-10-02; it operates a public partner programme with published terms (verified 2026-08-06), which requires payment infrastructure, tax handling and a business entity behind it; its terms pages and checkout are publicly reachable rather than gated behind sales contact.
What we have not verified: ScrapingBee’s success rates, pool quality, support responsiveness, or refund behaviour in practice. Nobody publishes independently audited numbers for those — including the review sites that quote precise success percentages. Our benchmark panel is on the methodology roadmap; until it ships we say “unmeasured” rather than guess.
Checking ScrapingBee’s reputation yourself: read its Trustpilot profile and recent Reddit threads (r/webscraping and related subreddits) with the standard filters — discount review bursts around promotions, weight detailed complaints about billing and refunds over star averages, and look for how the company responds to problems rather than whether problems exist. Then run the cheapest possible test against your own targets before committing real budget; no third-party opinion substitutes for that.
What we have not verified
Trial length, refund window and payment methods are marked pending until we confirm them by signing up — we do not copy terms from other review sites.
We publish no success-rate or speed benchmark for any provider yet. The testing panel is on the methodology roadmap; until it exists, any site quoting precise success percentages for every provider is either running a real lab or making it up.
Price history
Baseline recorded 2026-08-07. Every subsequent change to ScrapingBee’s published pricing is logged here and in the changelog with the date we caught it, which is the point of this site: the current price is easy to find, the trend is not.
FAQ
How much does ScrapingBee cost?
Verified 2026-10-02: plans from $49.00/month to $249/month on the published ladder. Compare on effective cost per successful request rather than plan price, since credit consumption varies by feature.
Does ScrapingBee offer a free trial?
Trial and refund terms are marked pending on this profile until we confirm them by signing up. We do not copy trial claims from other review sites, because those are frequently out of date.
Is ScrapingBee legit?
ScrapingBee is an established commercial operation: we verified its published pricing against its live site on 2026-10-02, and it runs public terms and a partner programme. What no one has independently verified — here or elsewhere — is performance. Check its Trustpilot and recent Reddit threads for reputation, then test small against your own targets; that beats any review site’s verdict, including ours.
Is web scraping illegal in the US?
Yes — using ScrapingBee is legal. Web scraping itself is lawful in most jurisdictions when it targets public data; risk concentrates around bypassing access controls, personal data, and contractual terms of the sites you scrape. ScrapingBee executing the requests does not transfer that responsibility away from you.
How does ScrapingBee work?
You send it a URL (plus options like JS rendering or premium proxies); its infrastructure fetches the page through its own proxy pool, handles retries and rendering, and returns the HTML — billing credits only on success. Your code does the parsing. The whole product is that the fight with anti-bot systems happens on their side of the API.
What is the best scraping tool?
Wrong axis — tools split by who does the work. APIs (ScrapingBee, Scrape.do, ScraperAPI) sell success per request; platforms (Apify, Zyte) sell managed workflows; open source (Scrapy, Playwright) sells control for your time. On verified pricing the cheapest per-request entry is Scrape.do at $0.11/1k credits; ‘best’ beyond price is workload-specific and unbenchmarked by anyone, including us.
Is there an AI that can scrape a website?
LLM-powered extraction exists — tools like Firecrawl shape crawls for AI pipelines, and several APIs bolt LLM parsing onto fetched pages — but the hard part remains access, not comprehension: proxies, rendering and anti-bot systems. AI changes what happens after the fetch; it does not exempt the fetch from any of it. We track fetch-layer pricing here and haven’t verified any AI-extraction tool’s rates.
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