Success-only billing
A pricing rule where failed requests are not charged. You pay for pages returned rather than attempts made.
Why it costs you money
It moves the effective price more than the headline rate does. At an 80% success rate, paying for every attempt costs a quarter more per page returned than paying only for the ones that worked, and hard targets run well below 80%. Three of the ten scraping APIs we track state this in writing on their own pages; the rest say nothing, and silence is not a promise. It is also the rule least visible in a price comparison, because it changes the denominator rather than the number being advertised.
See it in the data
Related terms
- Success rateThe share of requests that get through. The number that decides everything, and the one no comparison table can give you.
- Credit (scraping API)Scraping APIs bill in credits, and one credit buys different amounts of work depending on the request. What each provider charges, with sources.
- Ban rateThe share of requests a target site refuses. The number that decides real cost, and the one nobody publishes.
- CAPTCHA rateHow often a target serves a challenge instead of the page. A softer signal than a ban and it costs the same bytes.
- Every term we define