ScraperAPI alternatives in 2026
Finished rows at 5¢ to $1, search at $5 per 1,000.
ScraperAPI sells API credits by the month, from $49 for 100,000 on Hobby to $1,975 for 21,500,000 on Advanced. A standard page costs 1 credit, a Google or Bing request 25 and LinkedIn 30, and the balance resets when the plan renews. Each request returns one page, and your code turns the pages into records.
SpecStream is the live web data engine for teams and agents, and the best ScraperAPI alternative when the job is a dataset. You ask for the data in plain words. SpecStream searches the live web, reads the pages and returns structured rows that meet every condition you wrote, at 5¢, 15¢ or $1 a row. The Search API costs $5 per 1,000 searches and the Extract API $0.80 per 1,000 pages, and you see the most a run can cost before it starts.
New accounts get $10 of credit, no card.
SpecStream and ScraperAPI side by side
| SpecStream | ScraperAPI | |
|---|---|---|
| What you send | The data you want in plain words, with the conditions every row must meet | A URL with your API key. The docs list six ways to send it: the API endpoint, the Async API, the proxy port, Structured Data Endpoints, DataPipeline and the SDKs |
| What you get back | Structured rows, one record per company, place or filing, with facts from many sites joined. Source URL and read time on every value | The HTML of that page. output_format turns it into Markdown or text, and autoparse=true returns JSON or CSV for Amazon, eBay, Google, Redfin and Walmart |
| Search | The Search API answers a question from the live web in a few seconds: the answer, the page it was read from and the rows behind it. $5 per 1,000 searches of up to 10 results | A Google or Bing request costs 25 credits and returns that results page. Hobby's 100,000 credits are 4,000 such requests a month |
| Reading a page | The Extract API returns the main text of up to 20 pages or documents a call (PDF, Word, Excel) as Markdown or plain text, at $0.80 per 1,000 pages. A page that refuses a plain read is tried again in a real browser at the same price | 1 credit for a standard page. A request with render=true costs 10 credits, with premium=true 10, with both 25, and with ultra_premium=true 30 or 75 with rendering. A bot protection bypass adds 10. Amazon, Walmart and eBay cost 5 credits a request and LinkedIn 30 |
| Structured data from any site | The facts you name in the request come back as columns on every row, whichever sites hold them | For a site outside the supported list you train an AI Parser. The first is free, each further parser costs 30,000 credits, adding or changing a field costs 30,000 more, and a paid plan holds up to 5 |
| Data already held | Public databases read every morning at specstream.ai/data: every company that filed a Form D since 2023 with its filing history, nearly 2 million US nonprofits, every US bank failure since 1934, federal rules, open federal contracts and grants, and local businesses. Signals such as funding rounds, new executives and layoffs at specstream.ai/signals. Ask for your own cut of any of them | Each request fetches the URL you send. Structured Data Endpoints cover a list of supported domains, such as Amazon, Google and Walmart, one request at a time |
| A list you already have | Import a CSV, Excel file, Google Sheet or Airtable base of up to 20,000 rows. SpecStream fills in or checks each row and matches it to one identity, with any namesakes shown alongside their evidence. Import is free. A row that matches pays its rate, and a row that does not costs 5¢ | DataPipeline runs up to 100,000 URLs, keywords, ASINs or Walmart IDs at once, and the Async API takes up to 50,000 URLs a batch. Results come back as HTML, JSON or CSV |
| The unit you pay for | A delivered row: 5¢, 15¢ or $1 by how much the row needs, plus 5¢ for an email and 15¢ for a phone. The same rate on every plan | A credit, bought by the month: Hobby $49 for 100,000, Startup $149 for 1,000,000, Business $299 for 3,000,000, Scaling $475 for 5,000,000, Professional $975 for 10,500,000 and Advanced $1,975 for 21,500,000. The balance resets when the plan renews |
| Starting free | $10 of credit on sign-up, no card. That is up to 200 rows at 5¢, or 2,000 searches | A 7-day trial with 5,000 credits, no card. After it, a free plan of 1,000 credits a month with 5 concurrent threads |
| What failed or empty work costs | Nothing. A row left out, a retry and a run that finds nothing are not charged. On the Extract API a page that is blocked, missing or empty is not charged | A 200 and a 404 response are both charged, and so is a request you cancel before its 70 seconds of retries end. A request that fails after 70 seconds of retries is not charged |
| The cost cap before a run | The most the whole job can cost, quoted before it starts. Nothing runs until you approve it, and there are no automatic overages | max_cost caps a single request, and the Crawler stops at its credit budget. When the month's credits run out, scraping pauses, auto-upgrade moves the account to the next plan, or pay as you go (Scaling and above) keeps billing up to a monthly cap you set |
| Reruns and change labels | Hourly to yearly. Each row comes back labeled changed, unchanged or no longer matching. A changed or new row costs half its rate, an unchanged row 1¢ | DataPipeline projects run on a schedule you set, and the Crawler reruns hourly, daily, weekly or monthly on paid plans. Every request in a run spends its credits. DataPipeline keeps results up to 30 days and the Async API up to 72 hours |
| MCP and API | MCP server, REST API, Python and TypeScript SDKs, a CLI and A2A. An agent can buy one request with no account, by card or in USDC | A remote MCP server at https://mcp.scraperapi.com/mcp or a local one, the API, SDKs, a LangChain integration and a community n8n node |
| Where the data goes | Google Sheets, Excel, Airtable, Notion, monday.com, HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Attio, Slack, Teams, Zapier, Make, n8n and signed webhooks | The API response, a webhook, or a zipped download from the DataPipeline project page |
Why ScraperAPI buyers move to SpecStream
One request does the search, the reading and the record
On ScraperAPI you find the URLs, send each one, and parse what comes back. On SpecStream you write the job once, for companies, places, filings, tenders or products: "founder-owned machine shops in Ohio whose own site states ISO 9001, with the owner and a phone", or "open school HVAC tenders in Texas, with the agency and due date". SpecStream shows the request as parts you can edit, the conditions every row must meet and the facts to bring back, before anything runs. Then it searches the live web, reads each page and joins what it finds into one record per match.
A search costs $5 per 1,000 and comes back answered
ScraperAPI charges 25 credits for a Google or Bing request, so the $49 Hobby plan covers 4,000 results pages a month, and your code reads them. One SpecStream search costs $0.005 and returns the answer, the page it was read from, the time it was read and the rows behind it.
It is the most accurate web search API in the world: 97.9 F-score on all 1,000 official SimpleQA Verified questions (978 correct), and 64.0 item F1 and 43.4 row F1 on all 200 official WideSearch tasks. The Extract API scores 0.908 F1 on WCXB. The runs are dated November 8, 2026 at specstream.ai/benchmarks.
A protected page costs the same as a plain one
On ScraperAPI the price of a page depends on what it takes to load. JavaScript rendering costs 10 credits, a bot protection bypass adds 10, and Ultra Premium with rendering costs 75. The Extract API charges $0.80 per 1,000 pages whatever the page needs. A page that refuses a plain read is tried again as a browser would ask for it, then in a real browser, then from the site's own feed, then from its newest public archive capture. A page that gives no text is not charged, and a 404 is not charged either. ScraperAPI charges for a 404.
The price covers the whole job
ScraperAPI caps one request with max_cost, and the monthly bill follows how many pages the job turned out to need. SpecStream quotes the most the whole dataset can cost, good for 30 minutes, and nothing runs until you approve it. The charge never goes past that amount, and whatever the run does not use goes back to your balance. Reading and pricing a request cost nothing.
You pay for rows, and a top-up never expires
ScraperAPI credits reset when the subscription renews, used or not. SpecStream bills the rows that meet your request: 5¢ for a row with up to 5 facts, 15¢ for up to 15 facts and one set of related records, and $1 for a deep row with no limit. At 5¢ a row, 10,000 rows cost $500, and the searches and pages behind them cost nothing. A run that finds nothing costs nothing, and a top-up never expires.
Reruns label every row and land in your tools
Save the request and it reruns hourly to yearly. Each row comes back labeled changed, unchanged or no longer matching, a changed or new row costs half its rate and an unchanged row costs 1¢. New matches and changes land in HubSpot, Salesforce, Pipedrive, Attio, Sheets, Slack or Teams with no code, or in your agent through the MCP server. Rows you already own are never charged again.
Other ScraperAPI alternatives
SpecStream
The live web data engine for teams and agents. One request in plain words returns structured rows at 5¢, 15¢ or $1 a row, the Search API costs $5 per 1,000 searches and the Extract API $0.80 per 1,000 pages. New accounts get $10 of credit, no card, and every run is priced before it starts.
ScrapingBee
A web scraping API billed in credits. Plans run from Hobby at $19 a month for 75,000 credits to Business at $249 a month for 3,000,000. A request with JavaScript rendering costs 5 credits, and credits are valid for one month. The Extract API charges $0.80 per 1,000 pages whether or not a page needs a browser.
ZenRows
A scraping API billed in credits, with a free plan of 5,000 credits a month and paid plans from $19 a month for 45,000. JavaScript rendering costs 5 credits, premium proxies 10 and both together 25, and a 404 response counts as a successful result. On SpecStream a page that is not found is not charged.
Firecrawl
Search, Scrape, Crawl and Agent endpoints billed in credits, with 1,000 free credits a month and paid plans from $19 a month for 5,000 credits to $749 a month for 1,000,000. A page that answers 403 or 404 costs 1 credit. On SpecStream the pages read to find a row are not billed.
Apify
A platform for cloud programs called Actors. Plans cost $0, $19, $199 or $999 a month, most Actors charge per event at a price listed on the Actor's page, compute units cost $0.2 on Starter, and unused usage credits expire at the end of the billing cycle. SpecStream has one rate card for every request, the same on every plan, and a top-up never expires.
How SpecStream scores
The same numbers as the benchmarks page, from the official tasks and scorers.
| SpecStream |  Parallel |  Exa |  Tavily |  Perplexity | |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Web researchWideSearch, GPT-5.6 Luna | 60.9 | 45.5 | 53.0 | 47.9 | 47.0 |
| Factual accuracySimpleQA Verified, GPT-5.6 Luna | 96 | 94 | 91 | 94 | 94 |
| Factual accuracySimpleQA Verified, GPT-5.6 Sol | 99 | 97 | 91 | 92 | 95 |
How to switch from ScraperAPI
Write the data you want in plain words, in place of the URLs and parameters you send today. Sign up and you get $10 of credit, no card. At 5¢ a row, that is up to 200 rows.
Or send the request from code. This call spends nothing: the 402 reply shows how SpecStream read the request, the columns and the most it can cost.
curl -i https://api.specstream.ai/v1/agent/lists \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"request": "B2B software companies in Europe whose pricing page shows a free plan, with the pricing page URL, the price of the lowest paid plan and the head of product", "count": 25}'Approve that maximum by card through Stripe's Link agent wallet, or in USDC on Base, Arbitrum or Polygon, and you pay for the rows found. For the pages you already fetch one by one, send up to 20 URLs a call to POST https://api.specstream.ai/v1/extract. On an account, your agent uses the MCP server at https://api.specstream.ai/mcp and your team uses the workspace, from the same balance.
Frequently asked questions
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Does SpecStream have an API?
https://api.specstream.ai/mcp over Streamable HTTP with OAuth or an API key.What does SpecStream cover?
Sources
SpecStream wrote this page. Each rival figure comes from that company's own page.
- SpecStream pricingspecstream.ai/pricing, read Nov 9, 2026
- SpecStream for agentsspecstream.ai/agents.md, read Nov 9, 2026
- SpecStream benchmarksspecstream.ai/benchmarks, read Nov 9, 2026
- SpecStream dataspecstream.ai/data, read Nov 9, 2026
- SpecStream signalsspecstream.ai/signals, read Nov 9, 2026
- ScraperAPI pricingscraperapi.com/pricing/, read Nov 9, 2026
- ScraperAPI pricing, Markdownscraperapi.com/pricing.md, read Nov 9, 2026
- ScraperAPI docs, welcomedocs.scraperapi.com/readme.md, read Nov 9, 2026
- ScraperAPI credits and request costsdocs.scraperapi.com/getting-started/quick-start/credits-and-requests-costs.md, read Nov 9, 2026
- ScraperAPI status codesdocs.scraperapi.com/responses-and-formats/api-status-codes.md, read Nov 9, 2026
- ScraperAPI output formatsdocs.scraperapi.com/responses-and-formats/output-formats.md, read Nov 9, 2026
- ScraperAPI Async APIdocs.scraperapi.com/asynchronous-api/overview.md, read Nov 9, 2026
- ScraperAPI DataPipelinedocs.scraperapi.com/data-pipeline/what-is-datapipeline.md, read Nov 9, 2026
- ScraperAPI DataPipeline resultsdocs.scraperapi.com/data-pipeline/creating-a-datapipeline-project/results-and-output-formats.md, read Nov 9, 2026
- ScraperAPI Crawlerdocs.scraperapi.com/scraperapi-crawler-v2.0/introduction.md, read Nov 9, 2026
- ScraperAPI AI Parser pricing and limitsdocs.scraperapi.com/ai-parser/pricing-and-limits.md, read Nov 9, 2026
- ScraperAPI MCP serverdocs.scraperapi.com/integrations/llm-integrations/mcp-server.md, read Nov 9, 2026
- ScrapingBee pricingscrapingbee.com/pricing/, read Nov 9, 2026
- ZenRows pricingzenrows.com/pricing.md, read Nov 9, 2026
- Firecrawl pricingfirecrawl.dev/pricing.md, read Nov 9, 2026
- Apify pricingapify.com/pricing.md, read Nov 9, 2026