Credit (scraping API)
The unit a scraping API bills in. A credit is not a fixed amount of work: on the same plan, a page that needs a browser costs more than a plain fetch.
Why it costs you money
A credit price cannot be compared between providers without knowing what a credit buys, and it changes within one provider by request type. ZenRows draws 5 credits for JavaScript rendering, 10 for premium proxies, 25 for both, and a flat 25,000 per gigabyte of residential bandwidth, all from one balance. ScraperAPI charges 1 credit for a standard page. Of the ten scraping APIs we track, seven bill in credits and only two quote a price per gigabyte at all, so the per-GB figure this site compares proxies on does not reach them.
See it in the data
Related terms
- Per-GB pricingBilling by the gigabyte you move, the dominant model for residential proxies and the one most comparisons assume.
- Success-only billingSome scraping APIs charge only for requests that succeed. On a per-request product that is the largest single swing in what you pay.
- JavaScript renderingRunning a page's own scripts in a browser before returning it. Scraping APIs charge more for it, sometimes five times a plain fetch.
- Concurrency limitThe cap on how many requests you can have in flight at once. Often the real constraint on a scraping job, not price.
- Every term we define