Notes from the engineering team.
Writeups, benchmarks, and field notes on web data collection and AI infrastructure.
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8 best Apify alternatives in 2026 (pricing, benchmarks)
Eight Apify alternatives compared on September 2026 pricing, cost at 100,000 pages, license and MCP support, with where each one falls short.
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8 best Firecrawl alternatives in 2026 (pricing, benchmarks)
Eight Firecrawl alternatives with September 2026 pricing, cost at 100K pages, license, MCP support, and where each one falls short, including Spider Cloud.
8 best ScrapingBee alternatives in 2026 (pricing compared)
Eight ScrapingBee alternatives with September 2026 pricing, credit multipliers, cost at 100K pages, MCP support and where each falls short, including Spider Cloud.
8 best ZenRows alternatives in 2026 (pricing, benchmarks)
Eight ZenRows alternatives compared on September 2026 pricing, credit multipliers, cost at 100,000 pages, license and MCP support, with where each falls short.
Flat-rate web scraping vs. pay-as-you-go: which to put where
How the flat-rate Unlimited plan puts steady high-volume crawling on a fixed bill, where pay-as-you-go still wins, and how both run on one API key.
How to scrape the web at scale from your terminal
Every crawl mode the Spider CLI supports, with real examples, and how to go from one page to millions without leaving the terminal.
Spider Browser scores 85% on Browser Use's stealth benchmark
Spider Browser scored 85% on Browser Use's open stealth benchmark, beating every other cloud browser tested against 80 anti-bot protected sites.
Real-time web search for RAG: stop feeding your LLM stale data
Static document stores go stale in days. Add live web search to a RAG pipeline so the model answers with current data, in LangChain and in plain Python.
Web search API for AI agents: search and extract in one call
Stitching a SERP API, a scraper and a parser together is fragile and slow. Spider Cloud's Search API does all three in one request, which is what agents need.
Introducing Silk: our custom AI model for web data extraction
Silk is Spider Cloud's own extraction model. It turns raw HTML into structured data and solves captchas on our GPUs, with no external API calls and no per-token billing.
Case study: how a RAG pipeline went from 6 hours to 15 minutes
A Series A AI company replaced three Python microservices, a proxy provider, and half an engineer's time with a single Spider Cloud API call. This is what changed.
The 7 best web scraping APIs for AI in 2026
Spider Cloud, Firecrawl, Crawl4AI, ScrapingBee, Apify, Bright Data and Jina Reader compared on real pricing and benchmarks, with the trade-off each asks you to accept.
Oxylabs alternative 2026: Spider Cloud vs Web Scraper API
Oxylabs Web Scraper API plans, per-result rates and AI Studio credits priced against Spider Cloud's usage billing, with a migration example in both SDKs.
Apify alternative 2026: Spider Cloud vs Apify pricing and CUs
How Apify compute units, proxy bandwidth and plan floors add up at 10K, 100K and 1M pages, priced against Spider Cloud's usage billing, with a migration example.
Bright Data alternative 2026: Spider Cloud vs Web Unlocker
Bright Data Web Unlocker, Scraping Browser and residential proxy pricing at 10K, 100K and 1M pages, priced against Spider Cloud, with a migration example.
ZenRows alternative in 2026: the 25x multiplier, priced out
ZenRows charges 25 credits for a rendered page through premium proxies, so 250,000 credits buy 10,000 of them. Current plans, and how Spider Cloud compares.
Crawl4AI vs Spider Cloud in 2026: self-hosted vs managed
Crawl4AI is free Python you run yourself. Spider Cloud is a managed Rust crawler. The same 1,000 URLs on both, what self-hosting really costs, and code for each.
Firecrawl vs Spider Cloud in 2026: pricing, speed and MCP
Firecrawl's 2026 plans and credit rules against Spider Cloud's usage billing, what both crawlers did on the same 1,000 URLs, and how their MCP servers behave.
Jina Reader vs Spider Cloud in 2026: one URL vs a whole site
Jina Reader turns one URL into markdown from a prefix. Spider Cloud crawls whole sites and reaches protected pages. What each costs and where each fits.
Scrapfly vs Spider Cloud in 2026: credit multipliers and cost
Scrapfly's 2026 plans and credit multipliers worked through at 10K, 100K and 1M pages against Spider Cloud usage billing, plus the independent success-rate numbers.
Crawlera alternative 2026: Spider Cloud vs Zyte API pricing
Zyte API replaced Crawlera with per-request rates set by site tier and monthly commitment. Those bands priced against Spider Cloud, with a migration example.
NetNut alternative in 2026: what to use after the seizure
NetNut's domains were seized on July 2, 2026 and its parent paused the service. What teams that relied on NetNut need now, and how Spider Cloud covers it.
ScraperAPI alternative in 2026: credits, free plan, real cost
ScraperAPI's free plan is 1,000 credits a month and a rendered protected page costs 75 of them. What each plan really buys, and how Spider Cloud compares.
ScrapingBee alternative in 2026: credits, multipliers, cost
ScrapingBee's stealth proxy costs 75 credits a request, so a 1,000,000 credit plan buys 13,333 protected pages. How Spider Cloud prices the same work.
Spider Browser vs. Kernel vs. Browserbase: 999 URLs benchmarked
Kernel benchmarked cold start. We benchmarked reliability: 999 URLs, 254 domains, 18 categories, 100% success and 2.5s median end-to-end latency.
Spider MCP v2: browser automation for AI agents
Spider Cloud's MCP server now ships 22 tools, 9 of them browser automation, giving agents direct control of cloud browsers with anti-bot bypass and proxy rotation.
Build a production RAG pipeline with web data in under 30 minutes
Crawl a site with Spider Cloud, chunk the markdown, embed it, store it in a vector database and query it. Working code for LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI and AutoGen.
Building AI agents that browse the web
Architecture patterns and working code for web-browsing agents: research, monitoring and extraction, built on CrewAI and AutoGen with Spider Cloud as the backend.
Building an MCP server for web scraping
Build an MCP server in TypeScript that wraps Spider Cloud's API, giving any AI model the ability to crawl, scrape, search and extract structured data.
How to bypass Cloudflare, DataDome, and PerimeterX in 2026
A technical breakdown of how modern anti-bot systems detect scrapers, why manual bypass is unsustainable, and how Spider Cloud handles it automatically.
The developer's guide to choosing a scraping stack in 2026
DIY libraries, open source frameworks, managed APIs, AI-native extractors and browser automation, with a decision matrix and a hidden-cost audit for each.
Crawl4AI vs Firecrawl vs Spider Cloud: 1,000 URLs benchmarked
Crawl4AI vs Firecrawl on 1,000 real URLs: 89.7% vs 95.3% success rate, cost per 1K pages, RAG recall@5, and the method so you can rerun it yourself.
Open source web scraping: why MIT license matters
How MIT, Apache 2.0, AGPL and BSL affect your right to build commercial products on scraping tools, and why Spider Cloud picked MIT.
Rust vs. Python for web scraping: why we rewrote everything
Why Spider Cloud abandoned its Python scrapers and rebuilt in Rust: the benchmarks, the architecture decisions, and what the rewrite cost us.
Scraping 1 million pages: what actually happens
An engineering log of crawling 1 million pages across 10,000 domains with Spider Cloud's API. Throughput curves, failure modes, cost breakdown, and lessons learned.
How Spider Cloud went to market: what worked and what we'd redo
How we built Spider Cloud's go-to-market from zero: the channels that worked, the pricing mistakes, and the content that actually converted.
Top 5 data collection platforms for AI and web scraping in 2026
The leading data collection platforms compared on cost, speed, reliability and AI readiness, for teams building RAG pipelines and agents.
The true cost of web scraping at scale
What 10K to 10M pages a month really costs on self-hosted Scrapy, Firecrawl, Apify, Crawl4AI and Spider Cloud, counting proxies, infrastructure and engineer time.
From web page to vector database: the complete pipeline
The full pipeline from raw URL to queryable vector store: crawling, extraction, chunking, embedding and indexing, with working code and a cost breakdown.
Web scraping for AI training data: legal and technical guide 2026
What the EU AI Act, US fair use, and GDPR require of AI training data, and how to build a scraping pipeline that holds up in 2026.
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