Web scraping costs range from $0 (DIY) to $10,000+/month (enterprise proxy networks). The right choice depends on your scale, technical resources, and how much maintenance you're willing to absorb.
This is a practical pricing comparison of the major web scraping approaches in 2026, with real numbers and clear recommendations for different use cases.
The Five Approaches
Every web scraping project falls into one of these categories:
- Proxy providers (Bright Data, Oxylabs) — you write the scraper, they provide infrastructure
- Managed platforms (Apify) — pre-built scrapers with compute and proxy included
- Scraping APIs (ScraperAPI, ScrapingBee) — API call returns rendered HTML
- Data APIs (Proxycurl, RapidAPI vendors) — API call returns structured data
- DIY — your own servers, your own proxies, your own maintenance
Pricing Comparison Table
| Provider | Model | Entry Price | Mid-Scale (100K pages/mo) | Large Scale (1M pages/mo) | Includes Proxies | Anti-Bot Handling |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Bright Data | Per GB / per CPM | $2.80/GB residential | ~$280-500/mo | ~$2,000-4,000/mo | Yes | Yes (Web Unlocker) |
| Oxylabs | Per GB / per request | $3.00/GB residential | ~$300-550/mo | ~$2,200-4,500/mo | Yes | Yes (Web Unblocker) |
| Apify Platform | Per compute unit | $0.30/CU | ~$25-80/mo | ~$200-600/mo | Bundled in actors | Actor-dependent |
| Apify PPE Actors | Per result | $0.005-0.01/result | ~$50-100/mo (10K results) | ~$500-1,000/mo (100K results) | Included | Included |
| ScraperAPI | Per API call | $0.001/call (on plan) | ~$100/mo | ~$500/mo | Yes | Yes |
| ScrapingBee | Per credit | $0.0025/credit | ~$100/mo | ~$400-800/mo | Yes | Yes |
| DIY (VPS + free proxies) | Server costs | $5-20/mo VPS | ~$20-50/mo | ~$100-300/mo + your time | No (you manage) | No (you build) |
| DIY (VPS + paid proxies) | Server + proxy | $50+/mo | ~$150-400/mo | ~$1,000-3,000/mo | Purchased separately | You build |
Prices as of April 2026. Actual costs vary by target site complexity and anti-bot measures.
Detailed Breakdown
Bright Data
Best for: Large-scale operations that need residential/mobile IPs and can write their own scrapers.
Bright Data is the largest proxy network (72M+ residential IPs). Their pricing model is primarily per-GB for proxy traffic, with Web Unlocker (anti-bot) charged per CPM (cost per thousand requests).
- Residential proxies: $2.80/GB
- Datacenter proxies: $0.60/GB
- Web Unlocker: $2.50/CPM (per 1,000 successful requests)
- Minimum commitment on some plans
Hidden costs: You still need to write and maintain the scraper code, handle parsing, manage retries, and deal with site changes. Developer time is the real cost.
Oxylabs
Similar to Bright Data in pricing and capability. Residential at $3.00/GB, datacenter at $0.70/GB. Their Web Unblocker competes directly with Bright Data's Web Unlocker.
Apify Platform
Best for: Teams that want pre-built scrapers without infrastructure management.
Apify's pricing is based on compute units (CUs). One CU = 1 GB RAM for 1 hour of compute. At $0.30/CU, the actual cost depends on the actor (scraper) efficiency.
Free tier includes $5/mo in platform credits — enough for small experiments.
Many Apify Store actors use pay-per-event (PPE) pricing, where you pay per result instead of per compute unit. This is simpler to predict:
- LinkedIn Jobs scraper: $0.005-0.01 per job listing
- Google Search scraper: $0.003-0.005 per result
- E-commerce scrapers: $0.005-0.02 per product
PPE pricing includes proxy costs and anti-bot handling — no hidden fees.
ScraperAPI
Best for: Developers who want a simple API call that returns rendered HTML.
You send a URL, ScraperAPI returns the HTML after handling proxies, CAPTCHAs, and JavaScript rendering.
- Hobby: $29/mo (100K API credits)
- Startup: $99/mo (1M API credits)
- Business: $249/mo (3M API credits)
- 1 API credit = 1 standard request; JavaScript rendering costs 5-10 credits
Trade-off: You still need to parse the HTML yourself. Good for simple pages, expensive for JavaScript-heavy sites.
ScrapingBee
Similar model to ScraperAPI. Pricing starts at $49/mo for 150K credits. JavaScript rendering costs 5 credits per request. Includes Google Search API at 25 credits per search.
DIY
Best for: Technical teams with specific requirements and tolerance for maintenance.
The upfront cost is low — a $10/mo VPS, Playwright or Puppeteer, and free rotating proxies (if you can find reliable ones). But the real costs are:
- Developer time: 10-40 hours/month maintaining scrapers against site changes
- Proxy costs: Free proxies are unreliable; paid residential proxies cost $2-5/GB
- Anti-bot solutions: reCAPTCHA solving services ($1-3/1000 solves), browser fingerprint management
- Infrastructure: Error handling, retry logic, job queues, data storage
Realistic all-in cost for a maintained DIY scraper at scale: $500-3,000/month including developer time (valued at $50/hr).
Decision Matrix
| Use Case | Recommended | Why | Monthly Cost |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hobby/learning | DIY or Apify free tier | Learn the fundamentals, free or near-free | $0-5 |
| Startup MVP | Apify PPE actors | Pay per result, no infrastructure, predictable costs | $10-100 |
| Recruiting/HR data | Apify PPE (LinkedIn actors) | Purpose-built, handles LinkedIn anti-bot | $25-200 |
| SEO/marketing data | ScraperAPI or Apify | Both handle Google well, choose by volume | $29-250 |
| E-commerce monitoring | Bright Data or Apify | Bright Data for custom; Apify for pre-built | $100-1,000 |
| Enterprise (1M+ pages) | Bright Data + custom scrapers | Best proxy network at scale, but need dev team | $2,000-10,000 |
| One-time data collection | Apify PPE | No subscription, pay only for what you use | $5-50 |
What Changed in 2026
Several things shifted since 2024-2025:
- Proxycurl shut down — The popular LinkedIn/company data API closed in 2025. Alternatives: Apify actors, Bright Data datasets, or DIY.
- Anti-bot got harder — Cloudflare Turnstile, DataDome, and PerimeterX are on more sites. DIY scraping is increasingly expensive to maintain.
- Pay-per-result pricing expanded — More platforms offer PPE/pay-per-result models, which shifts risk from the buyer to the provider.
- AI assistants drive data demand — LLM-powered agents need structured data feeds, creating new demand for scraping infrastructure.
How to Calculate Your Actual Cost
Before choosing a provider, estimate your real needs:
# Quick cost estimator
pages_per_month = 100_000
avg_page_size_kb = 200
# Proxy provider (Bright Data)
data_gb = (pages_per_month * avg_page_size_kb) / 1_000_000
proxy_cost = data_gb * 2.80 # residential rate
print(f'Bright Data proxy only: ${proxy_cost:.0f}/mo')
print(f'+ Web Unlocker: ${(pages_per_month/1000) * 2.50:.0f}/mo')
# Apify PPE
ppe_cost = pages_per_month * 0.005 # low-end per result
print(f'Apify PPE: ${ppe_cost:.0f}/mo')
# ScraperAPI (Startup plan)
api_credits = pages_per_month * 1 # assuming no JS rendering
print(f'ScraperAPI: $99/mo (1M credits covers this)')
Bottom Line
For most developers and startups: Start with Apify's free tier or a PPE actor. You get structured data without managing proxies or infrastructure, and costs scale linearly with usage.
For scale (500K+ pages/month): Bright Data or Oxylabs give you the best proxy infrastructure, but budget for developer time to build and maintain scrapers.
For one-off projects: Pay-per-result pricing (Apify PPE actors) is almost always cheaper than a monthly subscription to any platform.
The biggest hidden cost in web scraping isn't the proxy bill — it's the engineering time to keep scrapers working as sites change. Factor that in before choosing DIY over a managed solution.
Prices verified as of April 2026. For the latest pricing, check each provider's website directly.