While open-source tools allow web scraping for free, they have limitations, and using paid services can be necessary for scaling. So, how much do they cost? Let's find out by exploring the factors affecting their pricing.
What affects web scraping costs?
Web scraping is accessible through open-source HTTP clients and parsing tools. Hence, recognizing the web scraping services offerings is crucial to understanding the reasoning behind their costs.
Web scraping APIs provide several features to assist the data extraction process. These features differ from a service to another. Therefore, we'll explore the critical ones shared across most services.
Ani-bot bypass
Web scraping blocking is a major challenge encountered during the data extraction process. It prevents the connecting client from reaching the desired resource by detecting them in the first place.
Websites use different anti-bot systems, from CAPTCHA and WAF services, such as Cloudflare, to custom-built shields. Bypassing such systems requires a deep knowledge of reverse engineering, security, and low-level details.
Additionally, anti-bot services are constantly updated to optimize their detection techniques or patch any discovered flaws. Therefore, maintaining such bypass systems is time-consuming, which results in additional costs.
Infrastructure
When using web scraping services, requests are continuously exchanged between the website and the service itself. Such operations are translated to cloud infrastructure costs.
Headless browsers are another major factor affecting infrastructure costs and are known to be resource-intensive. Furthermore, they add engineering-tied costs for:
- Managing and maintaining them at scale.
- Patching them against fingerprinting techniques to avoid their detection.
Proxies
Proxies notably affect the costs of web scraping services. While many websites don't employ anti-bot systems, finding ones that don't utilize IP address blocking is doubtful.
IP address blocking denies access to the origin server for a certain duration after exceeding a specified threshold. Bypassing such blocking only requires rotating the IP address.
🤖🤖🤖
A proxy server is a gateway that changes the IP address to another one in either of the below types:
- Residential, found in home networks.
- Mobile, assigned to cellular networks.
- Datacenter, assigned by cloud providers.
Proxy usage cost is determined by the bandwidth consumed based on its type. Residential and mobile proxies are more expensive than datacenter ones, as they are more likely to be used by human users. Hence, less-blocking chances.
What are the average costs for web scraping APIs?
Most web scraping services follow the API credits pricing model, where subscribing provides a certain amount of credits. Each time a request is sent, the service discounts specific amount of credits from the subscription quota. Hence, the final request cost is determined by the features enabled or resources used:
- Anti-bot encountered and its bypass used.
- Headless browser usage.
- Proxy pool type (residential, mobile, or datacenter).
- Bandwidth consumed.
⚖️⚖️⚖️
Choosing from the above features is completely dependent on the target website and use case. Hence, a website with both low protection and HTML page size consumes fewer API credits and vice versa.
Below is the industry pricing average for the common target websites and anti-bot services:
| Website | Min cost $/1000 | Max cost $/1000 | Average cost $/1000 |
|---|---|---|---|
| Amazon.com | $0.29 | $8.17 | $2.64 |
| Etsy.com (Datadome) | $1.17 | $13.47 | $4.66 |
| Stockx.com (Perimeterx) | $0.15 | $9.8 | $3.89 |
| Twitter.com | $1.8 | $30.84 | $6.99 |
| Zillow.com | $1.16 | $8.17 | $2.52 |
| Indeed.com (Cloudflare) | $1.16 | $9.8 | $3.7 |
The above pricing details represent the cost of requesting a thousand URLs of a given website across different scraper APIs. Refer to our benchmarks table for the full website evaluation list.
FAQ
How to save web scraping costs?
Using web scraping APIs efficiently saves time and costs while getting the best success rate, as they come with the necessary infrastructure and features for the data extraction process.
What is the cheapest web scraping service?
Theoretically, the cheapest web scraping service is determined by the amount of API credits offered based on the subscription price. However, attention should be paid to the number of API credits required for each request, which depends entirely on the target website. Refer to our weekly benchmarks for an overview of the cost needed to scrape the most popular target websites.
Summary
In this guide, we explored the main factors that add cost to a web scraping service, which in turn affects the final cost of individual requests based on the resource consumed. Birefly, web pages that don't require JavaScript rendering with less protection and lower bandwidth are cheaper to scrape.
For further details on the industry average costs, refer to our scraping APIs overview and benchmarks table for practical price comparison.