Apify vs Bright Data vs ScrapingBee: Real Web Scraping Cost per 10 Million Pages in 2026
The short answer: the three vendors bill different things, so the same 10 million pages can cost about $1,600 or about $61,000 on Apify depending on page type, retries and proxy bandwidth, while Bright Data's Web Unlocker charges a flat $1.30–$1.50 per 1,000 successful requests ($13,000–$15,000) and ScrapingBee prices in credits whose multipliers (5x for JavaScript rendering, 25x with a premium proxy, 75x for stealth) turn 10 million pages into anywhere from 10 million to 750 million credits. For static pages with a high success rate, Apify's compute-based billing is by far the cheapest modeled route (about $1,600 on the Scale plan, before a datacenter proxy cost that is not publicly disclosed). For JavaScript-heavy, anti-bot pages that need residential proxies and retries, the order inverts: Apify's bill is dominated by residential bandwidth ($7.50 per GB across roughly 7,100 GB of attempts), Bright Data's success-based Unlocker is the lowest published all-in price, and ScrapingBee's credit multipliers push it past its largest published plan into QUOTE-ONLY territory. "Pages fetched" is not a comparable unit across these platforms until the page type, retries and bandwidth are fixed.
The billing-unit mismatch, up front
Apify bills platform usage in compute units (1 GB of Actor memory for 1 hour), plus proxy bandwidth per GB, storage and data transfer. A browser Actor consumes several times the compute units per page that an HTTP scraper does, and failed or retried requests still consume compute and bandwidth. Bright Data bills per successful request for its Web Unlocker and Web Scraper API, per GB for proxy networks, and by plan commitment for larger volumes. ScrapingBee bills API credits per request, with the credit cost set by the options chosen: a request without JavaScript rendering is 1 credit, with rendering 5, with a premium proxy 10 (25 with rendering), and in stealth mode 75. These units cannot be compared by "requests": a ScrapingBee request can cost anywhere from 1 to 75 credits, and an Apify page can cost fractions of a cent in compute and dollars in proxy traffic.
What each vendor actually bills
Apify (OFFICIAL, apify.com/pricing, current as of September 2026). Free: $0 with $5 of monthly usage. Starter: $19 a month, prepaid as usage. Scale: $199 a month. Business: $999 a month. Enterprise: custom. (Apify's Starter price has moved more than once in 2026 and been reported at $29, $39 and $49 in various dated comparisons; the current confirmed figure is $19.) Each paid plan's price is prepaid usage, not an additional fee. Compute units cost $0.20 on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale and $0.13 on Business. Residential proxy traffic is $8 per GB on Free and Starter, $7.50 on Scale and $7 on Business; SERP proxies are $2.50 per 1,000 on Starter, $2 on Scale. Dataset storage is about $1 per 1,000 GB-hours and external data transfer $0.18–$0.20 per GB. A third-party benchmark puts 100,000 pages at roughly $19 for a lightweight HTTP (Cheerio) Actor and $67 for a browser Actor before proxies, which implies about 0.95 and 3.35 compute units per 1,000 pages at the $0.20 rate. Rental Actors are being retired by October 1, 2026, with pay-per-event Actors charging their own fees on top of platform usage. The datacenter proxy rate is not publicly disclosed.
Bright Data (OFFICIAL structure; rates REPORTED, May–September 2026). Web Unlocker: $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests pay-as-you-go, about $1.30 committed ($499 a month for 380,000 requests). Residential proxies: about $4 per GB with a promotion and a higher list price, or $499 a month for 141 GB (about $3.54 per GB) on a committed plan; city or ZIP targeting adds 20–40%. Web Unlocker bundles proxy rotation, CAPTCHA solving, browser fingerprinting and JavaScript rendering into one price and charges only for successful responses. Residential access sits behind identity verification. A datacenter proxy rate is not published.
ScrapingBee (OFFICIAL structure; plan figures REPORTED). Freelance $49.99 a month (250,000 credits, 10 concurrent requests), Startup about $99.99 (1 million credits), Business about $249.99 (3 million), Business+ $599.99 (8 million credits), Enterprise above. Credit costs per request: 1 without JavaScript rendering; 5 with rendering (the default); 10 with a premium proxy, 25 with a premium proxy and rendering; 75 in stealth mode. ScrapingBee is reported to bill successful requests only. The effective price per 1,000 credits on Business+ is $0.075 ($599.99 ÷ 8 million). No overage rate above 8 million credits is published.
Normalizing the workload
All ILLUSTRATIVE. 10 million successfully fetched pages a month. Scenario A: static HTML, datacenter proxies, 95% success per attempt, 100 KB transferred per attempt. Scenario B: JavaScript-heavy pages behind anti-bot protection, rendered in a browser, residential proxies, 70% success per attempt for self-managed collection, 500 KB transferred per attempt after blocking images and media. Managed unblockers that bill only for success are modeled at 10 million billable requests. Apify uses Scale-plan rates; its attempts are 10.53 million (A) and 14.29 million (B).
Cost at the normalized workload
Formulas: Apify = attempts ÷ 1,000 × CU per 1,000 pages × $0.16 + attempts × KB ÷ 1,000,000 × proxy $/GB; Bright Data Unlocker = successful requests ÷ 1,000 × $1.30–$1.50; ScrapingBee = pages × credit multiplier × effective $ per credit, where the effective rate is an ILLUSTRATIVE average derived from the largest plan, not a vendor overage price.
| Scenario | Apify (Scale) | Bright Data Web Unlocker | ScrapingBee |
|---|---|---|---|
| A: static, datacenter, 95% success | About $1,600 compute (10,000 CU); datacenter proxy cost not published | $13,000–$15,000 (an all-in unlocker; more capability than static pages need) | 10 million credits at 1 credit per page: exceeds Business+ (8 million); QUOTE-ONLY. ILLUSTRATIVE effective average: $750 |
| B: JS-heavy, anti-bot, residential, 70% success | About $61,229 ($7,657 compute for 47,857 CU + $53,571 residential bandwidth for 7,143 GB) | $13,000–$15,000 (success-based; retries and proxy bandwidth absorbed) | 250 million credits at 25 per page (premium proxy plus rendering): QUOTE-ONLY. ILLUSTRATIVE effective average: $18,750; stealth at 75 credits: $56,249 |
A residential-proxy route on Bright Data in Scenario B would add up to 7,143 GB of attempted traffic at roughly $3.54–$4 per GB, or about $25,300–$28,600, before any compute for the browsers.
Why bandwidth, not requests, decides the self-managed bill
In Scenario B, Apify's compute is $7,657 while residential bandwidth is $53,571: 87.5% of the total. Raising the success rate from 70% to 95% would cut attempts from 14.29 million to 10.53 million and the total by about 26%; halving the per-page transfer (blocking more resources) cuts the bandwidth line in half. For a success-priced product, a failed attempt costs the buyer nothing; for a self-managed Actor on residential proxies, a failed attempt costs full bandwidth. That is the structural reason a flat $1.30–$1.50 per 1,000 successful requests can sit well below a DIY residential build for hard targets even though its per-request price looks high next to Apify's compute figures.
Where each model is honest, and where it is not comparable
The table compares prices, not outcomes. A managed unblocker's success rate on a specific protected site is not the same as a generic 70% assumption, ScrapingBee's credit multiplier depends on which options the target requires, and Apify's per-page compute depends on the Actor chosen (marketplace Actors can add their own per-result or per-event fees). Scenario A's Bright Data figure also prices a heavyweight product against static pages; a proxy-only route would be cheaper but its datacenter rate is not publicly disclosed.
Sensitivity
- Residential bandwidth per page. The dominant lever on Apify in Scenario B: 500 KB versus 1 MB per attempt doubles the $53,571 proxy line.
- Success rate. Self-managed attempts scale with 1 ÷ success rate; managed unblockers that bill only for success are largely insulated.
- Credit multiplier on ScrapingBee. Moving from 25 to 75 credits triples the bill; moving from premium-with-rendering (25) to plain rendering (5) cuts it by 80%.
- Plan tier on Apify. Compute falls from $0.20 to $0.13 per CU and residential bandwidth from $8 to $7 per GB between Starter and Business; at this volume Business saves about $5,000 in Scenario B against Scale's rates.
Budgeting traps
- Comparing "10 million requests" across vendors. A ScrapingBee request can be 1 to 75 credits, and an Apify page can cost under a cent in compute and several cents in proxy bandwidth.
- Ignoring retries on self-managed scrapers. At 70% success you pay for 14.29 million attempts to receive 10 million pages.
- Reading plan prices as fees on top of usage. Apify's $199 is prepaid usage, not an extra charge.
- Using a stale Apify Starter price. It has moved more than once in 2026; the current figure is $19/month, not the $29, $39 or $49 still cited in some older comparisons.
- Assuming committed Bright Data rates apply to pay-as-you-go. $1.30 and $1.50 per 1,000 differ by 15%, and city targeting adds 20–40% on residential traffic.
What to ask before you buy
Run a sample of your real target pages through each product and record success rate, bytes transferred and credits or compute consumed per successful page. Ask ScrapingBee for its price above 8 million credits, ask Apify for Actor-level pricing and datacenter proxy rates, and ask Bright Data which product and committed tier fits your target mix.