Cheaper Bright Data alternative

The same pages for $0.80 per 1,000

Bright Data's free tier puts 5,000 credits at $7.50, and a Web Unlocker request, a SERP request and a scraped record each take one credit. That is $1.50 per 1,000. The SpecStream Extract API returns the main text of the page, without menus, footers and ads, at $0.80 per 1,000 pages, and a search costs $1 per 1,000.

There is no monthly plan to reach the lower price. The rate is the same for 1 call or 1 million, and the reply's price_usd names what each call cost.

Text ready for your model, scored on a public test

A Web Unlocker call returns the page's HTML for your parser. The Extract API returns the main text as Markdown, with the title, the published date and a status for each URL: ok, blocked, not_found, empty or failed. Only ok is charged. It reads PDF, Word and Excel files the same way.

The SpecStream Extract API scores highest on WCXB, at 0.908 F1, and the Search API scores 97.9 F-score on all 1,000 SimpleQA Verified questions (978 correct). Scores and method are on the benchmarks page.

Test it on your own URLs

Take the 20 URLs your scraper reads most, send them in one call, and read status and price_usd in the reply. At $0.80 per 1,000 pages, those 20 pages cost under 2¢ of the $10 credit.

curl https://api.specstream.ai/v1/extract \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SPECSTREAM_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"urls": ["https://example.com", "https://example.org"], "format": "markdown"}'

Rows when you need records, not pages

When the job is a list of companies, places or products, write it once in plain words. Deep Search finds every match on the live web, reads the pages that hold the facts and returns one row per match, at 5¢, 15¢ or $1 a row. Rows left out, retries and runs that find nothing are not charged, and nothing runs until you approve the most it can cost.

ScraperAPI

A scraping API that returns the page for a URL. Hobby costs $49 a month for 100,000 API credits. Code written for it runs on SpecStream by changing the base address to https://api.specstream.ai/scraperapi, at $0.80 per 1,000 pages with no plan.

Firecrawl

Search, scrape, crawl and map endpoints billed in credits: 1 credit a page, 4 more for JSON and 2 per 10 search results. Plans billed yearly run from $16 a month for 5,000 credits to $599 a month for 1,000,000. Its calls run on SpecStream at https://api.specstream.ai/firecrawl, where a page is $0.80 per 1,000.

Apify

A platform for cloud programs called Actors. The free plan has $5 to spend at $0.2 per compute unit, Business costs $999 a month at $0.13, 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.

SerpApi

A search engine results API. Starter costs $25 a month for 1,000 searches, and cached, errored and failed searches are not counted. Its calls run on SpecStream at https://api.specstream.ai/serpapi, in SerpApi's own JSON, at $1 per 1,000 searches.