Best scraping APIs for anti-bot protected sites
Sites behind bot protection need premium routes: residential IPs, fingerprinting and retries. Vendors expose this as a high credit multiplier, a hardest site tier, a dedicated unblocker product or per-GB residential traffic. Price is the easy part; success rate is the real test, and it is not measured here.
Prices checked . Prices only: we have not benchmarked success rate, speed or output quality, so treat this as a cost shortlist, not a verdict.
What this workload needs
- Know which class of protection your target uses and trial two vendors on it before comparing prices.
- Success-based billing (you pay only for successful requests) changes the economics; check each vendor's definition of success.
- Proxy-only products bill by bandwidth; page size decides the per-page cost.
Cost shortlist
- Zyte: about $100/month at 100,000 requests ($100/mo commitment - Tier 5 HTTP). Tends to fit: Per-site fair pricing where easy sites are very cheap. Watch-out: Cost varies 10x+ by site tier; you must check your target domains. MCP: Yes.
- Bright Data: about $150/month at 100,000 requests (Unlocker PAYG). Tends to fit: Hard anti-bot targets at scale. Watch-out: Many products with separate pricing pages; check which one you need. MCP: Yes.
- ScrapingBee: about $249/month at 100,000 requests (Business). Tends to fit: Developers wanting simple HTTP scraping with JS rendering. Watch-out: Default JS rendering means 5 credits per request unless you turn it off. MCP: Yes.
- Scrapfly: about $250/month at 100,000 requests (Startup). Tends to fit: Anti-bot-heavy scraping with transparent credit multipliers. Watch-out: Residential/Unblocker requests burn 5-25x the base credits. MCP: Yes.
The shortlist is the four lowest published-price estimates at 100,000 requests a month for protected / anti-bot page. It is rule-based (cheapest first) and not influenced by affiliate status.
Protected / anti-bot page: estimated monthly cost at example volumes
| Vendor | 10,000 / month | 100,000 / month | 1,000,000 / month |
|---|---|---|---|
| Zyte | $12.70 Pay as you go - Tier 5 HTTP | $100 $100/mo commitment - Tier 5 HTTP | $1,270 Pay as you go - Tier 5 HTTP |
| Bright Data | $15.00 Unlocker PAYG | $150 Unlocker PAYG | $1,500 Unlocker PAYG |
| ScrapingBee | $49.00 Freelance | $249 Business | not enough data |
| Scrapfly | $100 Pro | $250 Startup | not enough data |
| ScraperAPI | $299 Business | $299 Business | not enough data |
| ZenRows | $58.00 Launch (annual billing) | $458 Scale (annual billing) | not enough data |
| Hyperbrowser | $100 All plans (Fetch + ultra stealth) | $1,000 All plans (Fetch + ultra stealth) | $10,000 All plans (Fetch + ultra stealth) |
Partial or estimated, not ranked: Apify (component-only rate; see its page).
No usable published price for this request type: Firecrawl, Oxylabs, Browserbase, Tavily, Exa, SerpApi, Jina Reader, Crawl4AI, Brave Search API, Steel. They are not ranked rather than guessed.
Open the calculator with your own volume to compare all vendors side by side.
Residential proxy bandwidth: published rates
| # | Vendor | Plan / rate | Price per GB | Monthly spend needed | Billing |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 1 | Oxylabs | Flexible | $4.00 per GB | $500/mo | monthly |
| 2 | Apify | Business | $7.00 per GB | $999/mo | monthly |
| 3 | Bright Data | PAYG (list) | $8.00 per GB | none | payg |
How to choose
- Price per successful page is what counts: a cheaper rate with a lower success rate costs more.
- Compare the premium-route price, not the plain-page price; the multiplier is often 10x or more.
- For very high volume or hard targets, compare managed unblockers with proxy networks and consider asking for quotes.
Related comparisons
- Zyte vs Scrapfly
- Bright Data vs Oxylabs
- Apify vs Bright Data
- ScraperAPI vs ZenRows
- Which tool? (Anti-bot protected sites section)
Other use-case guides
- RAG and LLM ingestion
- Ecommerce price monitoring
- SERP data
- JavaScript-heavy sites
- AI agent web search
- Browser automation for agents
FetchIndex has an affiliate relationship with Firecrawl; it does not change prices, rankings or caveats (disclosure). This page contains no affiliate links.