AI-powered systems often need to fetch (a.k.a. scrape) the content of web pages.
But reliably fetching that content can be surprisingly challenging.
Naive approaches often fail.
For example:
- Dynamically-loaded content: Some websites use JavaScript to load content dynamically. A simple ‘wget’ or similar won’t retrieve that content.
- Bot-blocking technology: Other websites intentionally try to block any access by automated means.
Many people use web scraping APIs to help get around these issues.
What Do Web Scraping APIs Do?
Web scraping APIs give you a simple, reliable way to say “fetch this page for me” without having to deal with all the messy details yourself.
At a high level, a web scraping API usually works like this:
- You call a single HTTP endpoint.
- You pass it the target URL (plus a few options).
- It returns the fetched content (HTML, text, sometimes JSON or a screenshot) along with metadata.
Behind that simple interface, the API is doing a lot of work for you:
- Handling networking and reliability
- Following redirects.
- Retrying failed requests and handling timeouts.
- Dealing with SSL/TLS quirks and broken servers.
- Managing concurrency so you don’t overload either your own systems or the target site.
- Rendering dynamic pages
- Spinning up headless browsers (e.g. Chrome/Chromium under the hood).
- Executing JavaScript so dynamically-loaded content appears in the final HTML.
- Waiting for network activity or specific selectors before returning the page.
- Getting past bot defences
- Rotating IP addresses and geolocations.
- Rotating or customising request headers (user agent, referrer, etc.).
- Managing cookies and sessions.
- Adding jittered delays and realistic access patterns.
- Sometimes handling CAPTCHAs or other common “are you a bot?” mechanisms.
- Normalising the output
- Returning HTML in a consistent shape (e.g. de-compressed, correctly encoded).
- Optionally extracting the “main content” (article body, product details) and stripping boilerplate.
- Providing clean text versions suitable for feeding into an LLM.
- Attaching useful metadata such as status codes, response time, and error details.
- Operating at scale
- Queuing and rate-limiting requests so you can crawl thousands or millions of pages.
- Providing dashboards and logs so you can see failures and adjust your strategy.
- Supporting batch jobs and webhooks so scraping fits into larger workflows.
Web Scraping APIs
Here are some web scraping APIs you may like to consider.
| Web Scraping API | Free Offering | Lowest Price Paid Tier |
|---|---|---|
| Apify | Free plan with $5 monthly platform credit (no credit card required) | PAYG + Prepaid: Starter plan $39/mo (includes $39 credit; pay-as-you-go usage $0.30/compute unit) |
| Bright Data | 7-day free trial | PAYG: ~$1.50 per 1,000 results (subscription option $499/mo for ~510k results) |
| Zyte | $5 free credit on sign-up (≈7-day trial) | PAYG: Dynamic usage-based pricing (starts ≈$0.13 per 1,000 calls for simple sites) |
| ScraperAPI | 1,000 API calls/month + 7-day trial (5,000 calls) | Subscription: $49/month for 100,000 API credits (no PAYG option) |
| ScrapingBee | 1,000 API calls free trial (one-off, no credit card) | Monthly: $49/month for ~150k–250k requests (Freelance plan) |
| Oxylabs | 7-day free trial (no credit card required) | Subscription: Starts at $49/month for ~17,500 results (successful requests only) |
| Decodo | 7-day free trial (up to ~1,000 requests) | Subscription: Starter plan ~$29–30/month for ~15–23k results (PAYG not offered) |
| Rayobyte | 5,000 free scrapes per month | PAYG: $0.0018 per request (no monthly minimum) |
| Shifter | 7-day free trial (for companies, upon request) | Subscription: Starting at $44.99/month for base package |
| ZenRows | 14-day free trial (up to 1,000 API requests) | Monthly: Developer plan $69/month for 250k base requests (credit system applies) |
| ScrapingAnt | 10,000 API credits (personal use) | Monthly: $19/month for 100,000 API credits (Enthusiast plan) |
| Crawlbase | 1,000 free requests trial (no credit card) | Subscription: $29/month for 50,000 successful requests (includes full proxy + JS support) |
| Diffbot | 10,000 API credits per month (forever) | Subscription: Plans from $299/month (base tier for ~crawl & extract APIs) |
| Nimbleway | Free trial (~7 days with limited credits) | PAYG: ~$3 per 1,000 requests (on-demand); Starter package $150/month for ~150k requests |
| Spaw | None | Subscription: Basic plan $39.99/month for 10,000 API requests |
| WebScraping | 7-day free trial (1,000 credits) + free tier 1,000 credits/month | Monthly: Starter plan $19/month for 100,000 API credits (20 concurrent) |
| ScrapFly | 1,000 API credits | Subscription: Starts at $30/month for 200,000 API credits (base plan) |
| Zenscrape | 1,000 API requests per month | Subscription: Starts at $30/month for 250,000 requests (Small plan) |
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