Scrapfly looks attractive on the surface — its 98.8% Scrapeway success rate is the best in the industry. But ASP dynamic pricing silently multiplies your costs mid-request, monthly credits reset with no rollover, and automatic PAYG overflow can double your bill without warning. ScrapeBadger trades the absolute success-rate ceiling for predictable flat-credit pricing and bills you can plan around.
| Feature | ScrapeBadger | Scrapfly |
|---|---|---|
| Starting price | $10 one-time · no subscription | $30 / mo Discovery · subscription with monthly reset |
| Credits expire | Never expire | Reset monthly · no rollover on any plan |
| Cost per request — predictable? | Yes — flat 23 credits Stealth mode (known before request sent) | No — ASP can upgrade 1cr → 25cr+ mid-request |
| PAYG overflow bill risk | None — no overages possible (credits run out, requests stop) | Up to 125% of quota auto-charged · $437+ overage possible on Pro |
| Annual billing available | No subscription needed — large credit packs replicate annual savings | No annual plans · month-to-month only · no discount |
| Anti-bot bypass — documented systems | Cloudflare, DataDome, Akamai, Imperva, PerimeterX, Kasada (named & documented) | ASP dynamic bypass · not individually documented by system |
| Failed request billing | Always free | Free if under 30% failure rate · "fairness policy" triggers above 30% |
| Plan jump from entry to mid-tier | Not applicable — no tier locks | $30 → $100 (3.3×) · no mid-range option |
| Residential proxy cost | Included in flat 23-credit Stealth mode | +25 credits per request on top of base · 30× more than datacenter |
| Result caching | No cache — always live data | Optional caching available · cached data may not reflect current state |
| Free trial | 1,000 credits, no card, no expiry | 1,000 credits, no card · "burns fast" per user reports |
| Overall success rate (Scrapeway) | Named bypass for protected sites | #1 industry — 98.8% (industry avg 59.5%) |
| Average $/1K scrapes (Scrapeway) | ~$0.18 Stealth on Growth pack — fixed | $3.90 avg across benchmark targets · industry avg $3.20 |
| SDK languages | Python, Node.js / TypeScript | Python, TypeScript, Go, Rust, Scrapy |
| Volume | ScrapeBadger | Scrapfly |
|---|---|---|
| Entry / Discovery | $10 one-time · 100K credits · 4,347 Stealth requests · never expires | $30 / mo · 200K credits · monthly reset · no PAYG |
| Mid-tier / Pro | $40 one-time · 500K credits · 21,739 Stealth requests · $0.08/1K | $100 / mo · 1M credits · PAYG overflow at $3.50/10K |
| Business | $120 one-time · 2M credits · $0.06/1K | $250 / mo · 3M credits · higher concurrency |
| Overage risk on Pro plan | Zero — no auto-billing, ever | Up to +$437 auto-charged at 125% PAYG cap |
| Effective cost per protected-site scrape | Fixed 23 credits · $0.18/1K on Growth | ~30 credits with ASP+JS · $3.90/1K Scrapeway avg |
Install the ScrapeBadger SDK: pip install scrapebadger (or npm install scrapebadger)
Sign up at scrapebadger.com/auth/signup — your API key is in the dashboard, no credit card required
Replace `client = ScrapflyClient(key=...)` and `client.scrape(ScrapeConfig(url=..., asp=True, render_js=True, country=...))` with `client = ScrapeBadger('sb_live_...')` and `client.web.scrape(url=..., render_js=True, country=..., format='html')`
Drop the `asp=True` flag — ScrapeBadger always includes anti-bot bypass when render_js=True (no cost upgrade surprise)
Read response from `result.content` instead of `result.scrape_result["content"]`
No need to check X-Scrapfly-Api-Cost header — every Stealth request costs a flat 23 credits, known in advance
Test with the 1,000 free trial credits, then cancel your Scrapfly subscription once verified
For pure success-rate-critical workloads where Scrapfly's 98.8% benchmark genuinely matters, run a side-by-side test on your actual targets before committing to migration
On raw success rate, yes. Scrapeway's independent benchmarks rank Scrapfly #1 overall with a 98.8% success rate versus an industry average of 59.5%. If reliability on difficult protected sites is your absolute priority and budget predictability is secondary, Scrapfly is genuinely the strongest choice. ScrapeBadger is a better fit for teams who need named anti-bot bypass at predictable costs with credits that never expire — you trade the absolute success-rate ceiling for a bill you can plan around.
Scrapfly's ASP (Anti-Scraping Protection) system automatically upgrades your proxy pool mid-request when it detects anti-bot protection on the target site. A datacenter request priced at 1 credit can silently become a 25-credit residential request if ASP determines the site requires it. Add JS rendering (+5 credits) and you're at 30 credits for what started as a 1-credit call. Scrapfly documents this and recommends checking the X-Scrapfly-Api-Cost response header after every request — but you cannot predict the cost before the response is returned, which makes monthly budgeting on protected-site workloads difficult.
No. According to Scrapeway's feature comparison, Scrapfly does not offer annual billing plans. Every subscription is month-to-month at the listed monthly rate with no annual discount. This is unusual compared to most competitors (e.g. ScraperAPI) that offer 10–20% off for annual commitment. ScrapeBadger has no subscription at all — large non-expiring credit packs replicate the economics of annual billing with more flexibility.
Scrapfly activates pay-as-you-go (PAG) billing automatically when you exceed your monthly quota. PAG is capped at 125% of your monthly included credits at $3.50 per 10,000 extra credits. On the Pro plan with 1,000,000 included credits, this means up to 1,250,000 extra credits — a potential $437.50 in automatic overage charges on top of the $100 base subscription. Scrapfly provides project-level spending limits and throttle settings that can prevent this, but they require deliberate configuration. ScrapeBadger has no overflow billing at all — when credits run out, requests stop until you top up.
For predictable workloads, yes. ScrapeBadger's Stealth mode costs 23 credits flat per request — full anti-bot bypass and JS rendering bundled. At $0.08/1K credits on the Growth pack, that's roughly $0.18 per 1,000 Stealth pages. Scrapfly's effective cost depends heavily on whether ASP triggers — Scrapeway pegs Scrapfly's average at $3.90 per 1,000 scrapes across their benchmark targets, above the $3.20 industry average. ScrapeBadger's Starter pack is also $10 for 100,000 credits that never expire, versus Scrapfly's $30/month Discovery for 200,000 credits that reset monthly.
Choose Scrapfly if raw success rate is your top priority and you're targeting heavily protected sites where nothing else works. Scrapfly's 98.8% Scrapeway benchmark success rate is the best in the industry. Its ASP system dynamically adapts to site-level protections in ways that fixed-pricing APIs cannot. The higher and less predictable cost is the trade-off for that reliability ceiling. If your budget matters more than the last 1-2% of success rate, ScrapeBadger's flat 23-credit Stealth mode at $0.18 per 1,000 protected-site scrapes is a much better economic fit.
ScrapingBee works well for basic scraping. But if you've hit credit-reset waste, the 5× JS multiplier, or the $49/month minimum — ScrapeBadger is the ScrapingBee alternative built to fix them. Credits never expire, no monthly subscription, and anti-bot bypass on every plan.
CompareScraperAPI is a well-established platform trusted by thousands of companies. But three specific issues push developers to look for alternatives — geotargeting locked to US & EU on starter plans, credits charged for blocked requests, and a forced 10-minute cache on difficult targets that returns stale data without warning.
CompareScrapingdog is purpose-built for Google and Amazon structured data. But if your targets go beyond those dedicated APIs — or you need broader geo coverage, named anti-bot bypass, and credits that never expire — these are the friction points developers hit. ScrapeBadger now also offers 18 dedicated Google scraper APIs of its own.
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