ScraperAPI Review 2026: Free Trial, Honest Pricing Breakdown, and Whether It's Worth It

You've probably been there. You write a scraper, it works great for two days, and then the site starts throwing 403s at you like confetti. You add proxies. Proxies get banned. You add CAPTCHA solving. The site detects the headless browser. Somewhere around week three of this loop, you start wondering if there's a better way.

There is, and it's called ScraperAPI.

This is an honest look at what ScraperAPI actually does, what it costs in 2026, and whether it's the right tool for you — based on real pricing data, user reviews, and hands-on product research.

What ScraperAPI Actually Does

ScraperAPI sits between your code and the web. You send it a URL. It sends back the HTML. That's the whole interaction from your side.

Behind the scenes, though, it's doing a lot. It rotates through a pool of over 40 million IP addresses. It solves CAPTCHAs automatically. If the page uses JavaScript to load content, it fires up a headless browser and renders it. It handles user agent rotation, retry logic, and all the other tedious plumbing that makes scraping at scale such a pain to maintain.

The result: you write GET https://api.scraperapi.com?api_key=YOUR_KEY&url=TARGET_URL and get the page back. Your code doesn't need to know about proxies or anti-bot detection. That complexity just disappears.

👉 Start your free 7-day trial — no credit card required

Who's Using It

ScraperAPI isn't some niche product. Over 10,000 companies and developers use it, and the list includes Deloitte, Sony, Alibaba, and Nielsen. It's served over 11 billion requests in the past 30 days alone. That's the kind of scale that tells you the infrastructure is real and battle-tested, not a weekend side project held together with duct tape.

For smaller developers, that enterprise-level infrastructure is available even on the entry-level plan. You get the same IP rotation pool, the same CAPTCHA handling, the same JavaScript rendering — just with a lower monthly credit limit.

Pricing in 2026: What You Actually Pay

ScraperAPI uses a credit-based pricing model. Each successful request costs credits, and the number of credits depends on the complexity of the request. A basic HTML fetch costs 1 credit. E-commerce sites (with JS rendering and residential IPs) cost around 5 credits. Search engines like Google cost 25 credits per request.

Here's the current plan breakdown:

Hobby — $49/month (or $44/month billed annually)
100,000 API credits, 20 concurrent threads, US & EU regions

👉 Get started with the Hobby plan

Startup — $149/month (or $134/month billed annually)
1,000,000 API credits, 50 concurrent threads, US & EU regions

Business — $299/month (or $269/month billed annually)
3,000,000 API credits, 100 concurrent threads, full country-level geotargeting

Scaling — $475/month (or $427/month billed annually, most popular)
5,000,000 API credits, 200 concurrent threads, full geotargeting

Enterprise — custom pricing
5M+ credits, 200+ threads, dedicated support team, Slack channel

All plans include JS rendering, premium residential and mobile IPs, advanced anti-bot bypassing, structured data APIs, and DataPipeline access. The Enterprise tier adds a dedicated account manager and Slack support.

Annual billing saves 10% across all plans, which isn't massive, but adds up over time. A 7-day free trial is available with no credit card required — you get 5,000 API credits to test with on real projects.

👉 See full pricing and start your free trial

Promo Code: START10

The most reliably verified discount code for ScraperAPI in 2026 is START10, which gives 10% off your first month on any paid subscription plan. It's designed for new users signing up to a paid plan. Apply it in your dashboard after creating an account.

There's also an annual billing discount of 10% built into all plans automatically. If you're committing for a full year, that stacks into meaningful savings without needing a code.

What ScraperAPI Is Really Good At

E-commerce price monitoring. Structured Data Endpoints (SDEs) for Amazon, Walmart, Google Shopping, and others return clean JSON directly — no HTML parsing required. You get product names, prices, ratings, and rankings as structured data, ready to drop into a database or spreadsheet.

SERP data collection. The Google Search Endpoint returns parsed search results for any keyword query. Useful for SEO agencies tracking rankings, advertisers monitoring competitors, or anyone who needs fresh search data at scale without manually loading pages.

Geotargeted scraping. With proxies across 50+ countries, you can request region-specific versions of pages — see what a product page looks like from Germany, Japan, or Brazil. The Business plan and above unlock full country-level targeting.

Async scraping at scale. The Async Scraper Service lets you submit millions of URLs and retrieve results without blocking your application. You fire requests, ScraperAPI processes them, and you collect results when they're ready.

DataPipeline. For non-developers or teams that don't want to write code, DataPipeline lets you set up automated scraping jobs through a visual interface. Define what you want, set a schedule, and the data shows up where you need it.

What Real Users Say

The honest answer is: mostly positive, with some consistent complaints worth knowing.

On TrustPilot (43 reviews) and Capterra (50+ reviews), users highlight three things repeatedly: the documentation is clear and getting started takes minutes, the support team responds fast and actually helps, and the price is reasonable compared to competitors.

One user with over 12 years of experience in web data consulting described the proxy rotation as nearly seamless, saying it saved hours of debugging work. A Capterra reviewer who'd been a customer for two-plus years noted they could upgrade, downgrade, or pause their subscription without friction — which is not something you can take for granted with SaaS tools.

The recurring criticism is credit cost predictability. If you're hitting JavaScript-heavy e-commerce sites or search engines, credits multiply quickly (5x and 25x respectively), and it can be hard to estimate monthly spend until you've run a real workload. A few users also reported occasional timeouts and inconsistent behavior on specific sites — ScraperAPI works well on most targets but isn't bulletproof on sites with highly aggressive bot detection.

The bottom line from actual users: it's not perfect, but it solves the core problem reliably and costs less than building the infrastructure yourself.

How It Compares

ScraperAPI positions itself as the developer-friendly, cost-effective middle ground between "build it yourself" (expensive in time) and enterprise solutions like Bright Data (expensive in dollars). At $49/month for the Hobby plan, it's one of the most affordable entry points in the web scraping API space.

Bright Data starts at $499/month for growth plans and is aimed at enterprise teams with non-negotiable success rate requirements. Oxylabs is similarly priced and positioned. ScraperAPI costs less and gets you started faster — the trade-off is that Bright Data's 150M+ IP network and specialized scrapers for 120+ platforms offer higher ceiling capability for the most challenging targets.

For most developer use cases — e-commerce monitoring, SERP tracking, market research, lead generation — ScraperAPI handles the job at a price that doesn't require budget approval from three levels of management.

👉 Try ScraperAPI free for 7 days

The Credit System, Explained Simply

New users often get tripped up by the credit system. Here's how it actually works:

Every plan gives you a bucket of API credits per month. Each request you make costs some number of credits:

• Basic HTML scraping: 1 credit

• JavaScript rendering: 5 credits

• Premium residential/mobile proxies: 10–25 credits

• Structured endpoints (Amazon, Google, etc.): 25 credits

You only pay for successful requests. If ScraperAPI fails to return the page, you don't lose credits. That's a genuinely fair model — you're not burning budget on failures.

If you run out of credits before your renewal date, Hobby/Startup/Business plan users can upgrade to the next tier. Scaling and Enterprise plan users can continue on a pay-as-you-go basis at a fixed rate per extra credit.

Getting Started in About 5 Minutes

1. Sign up for a free account — you get 1,000 free API credits and a 7-day trial, no credit card needed

2. Grab your API key from the dashboard

3. Make your first request: https://api.scraperapi.com?api_key=YOUR_KEY&url=https://example.com

4. That's it. You're scraping.

ScraperAPI supports Python, Node.js, PHP, Ruby, Java, and cURL. The documentation covers all of them with working examples. Most developers have their first successful request within a few minutes of creating an account.

For teams that need scale or structured data, the next step is exploring the Async Scraper Service and the Structured Data Endpoints — both are documented clearly and accessible from the same dashboard.

👉 Create your free account and start collecting data

Is It Worth It?

If you're spending engineering hours maintaining proxy pools, debugging CAPTCHA failures, and keeping headless browsers up to date — yes, almost certainly. The math usually works out in favor of paying $49–$149/month to offload that maintenance than paying a developer to fight it.

If you're scraping a handful of pages per day for a personal project and cost is a primary concern, the free tier (1,000 credits/month) might cover your needs entirely. If it doesn't, the Hobby plan at $49/month is about the price of a dinner for two — and it handles 100,000 standard page requests.

The 7-day free trial with 5,000 credits is genuine — it gives you enough runway to test on real targets with real volume before committing to anything. That's a reasonable way to evaluate whether ScraperAPI fits what you're building.

👉 Start your free 7-day trial — no credit card required