Home / Methodology
How Scrapemarket estimates scraper API cost
We scrape public pricing pages daily, normalize plans into comparable unit families, and rank estimated monthly spend for the volume you enter — not brochure marketing copy.
What we measure
- Public list prices only (subscription and pay-as-you-go cards we can parse).
- Unit metrics such as requests, credits, results, or records.
- Included monthly volume, unit price per 1k, and obvious plan caveats when published.
Currently tracking 4 providers, 22 plans, 868 snapshots, and 25 detected price/plan changes.
How an estimate is built
- You pick a unit family (e.g. successful results vs requests/credits).
- You enter a monthly volume in that family’s units.
- For each public plan in that family we estimate monthly cost: base list price plus overage when your volume exceeds included units (using published per-1k rates when available).
- Plans without enough public fields are marked incomplete and de-ranked.
We never mix result-billed and request-billed plans in one ranking — different units are not interchangeable without your own success-rate conversion.
What we do not claim
- Negotiated enterprise discounts, custom SLAs, or unpublished SKUs.
- Runtime success rates, CAPTCHA difficulty, or your exact concurrency needs.
- That the cheapest estimate is always the best operational fit.
Freshness & history
Vendors update pricing pages without notice. We refetch on a daily schedule, store snapshots, and surface diffs on Price changes (also available as RSS from the API). Provider pages show recent observation history so you can see list-price drift.
Affiliate disclosure
Some “open pricing” buttons use affiliate or referral links (for example ScraperAPI, Oxylabs, Bright Data). If you purchase after following those links, we may earn a commission. Rankings and dollar estimates are computed from the same public list prices regardless of whether a link is affiliate-tagged.