Spider vs. ScrapingBee: No Hidden Credit Multipliers, Real Browser Control

ScrapingBee advertises generous credit counts: 250,000 on the Freelance plan, 1,000,000 on Startup. What the pricing page doesn’t make obvious is that a single request can consume 75 credits. That 250,000-credit plan might only give you 3,333 actual requests.

Spider has no credit multipliers. A page is a page.

How ScrapingBee’s credit system works

ScrapingBee multiplies your credit cost based on the features you enable:

Source: ScrapingBee credit system docs

Here’s the detail that catches people: JavaScript rendering is on by default (render_js=true). If you don’t explicitly set render_js=false in every request, you’re spending at least 5 credits per page from day one. Most developers don’t notice until they check their dashboard and half their credits are gone.

Need stealth proxies for protected sites (which covers most production scraping in 2026), and each request costs 75 credits:

Source: scrapingbee.com

That $49/month Freelance plan gives you 3,333 requests when scraping protected sites, roughly $14.70 per 1,000 pages.

What Spider costs instead

Spider doesn’t have a multiplier table. You pay for data transferred and compute time used, and those numbers don’t change based on whether a site uses Cloudflare, DataDome, or nothing at all. The production average across real customer workloads is about $0.48 per 1,000 pages (pricing details).

At 40,000 pages per month with stealth:

• ScrapingBee: $249 (Business plan, fully consumed)
• Spider: ~$26

That’s roughly a 10x difference, and it widens if your workload doesn’t perfectly fit one of ScrapingBee’s plan tiers (unused credits expire monthly).

What happens when you need to click something

This is the hard wall with ScrapingBee. It’s a request-response API: you send a URL, you get HTML back. If the data you need only appears after a user interaction, ScrapingBee can’t reach it.

Real estate is a good example. Zillow, Redfin, and Realtor.com all hide detailed property data behind “see more” or “show details” buttons. Tax history, school information, price history, HOA fees, all behind clicks. ScrapingBee gives you the initial page load and nothing else.

Here’s what that workflow looks like with Spider Browser:

import { SpiderBrowser } from "spider-browser";

const spider = new SpiderBrowser({
  apiKey: process.env.SPIDER_API_KEY,
  stealth: 0, // auto-escalates when blocked
});

await spider.init();

await spider.page.goto("https://www.zillow.com/homedetails/123-main-st");

// Expand the collapsed sections
await spider.page.click(".see-more-facts");
await spider.page.waitForSelector(".all-facts-table");

// Scroll to load the price history section
await spider.page.act("Scroll down to the price history section");

// Extract everything in one call
const property = await spider.page.extract(`
  Get the listing price, bedrooms, bathrooms, square footage,
  year built, lot size, HOA fees, tax history for the last 3 years,
  and price history for the last 5 sales
`);

console.log(property);
await spider.close();

That extract() call returns structured JSON. No CSS selectors, no XPath, no regex. Describe the data in English and the AI figures out where it lives on the page, even across multiple expanded sections that weren’t in the initial HTML.

With ScrapingBee, you’d get the collapsed page and miss the tax history, price history, and most of the property details. You’d also need to parse the raw HTML yourself.

AI extraction as a cost layer vs. a feature

ScrapingBee offers AI extraction as a paid add-on. It consumes additional credits on top of the base request cost. So a stealth request (75 credits) plus AI extraction pushes you well past 75 credits per page.

Spider Browser’s AI methods (extract(), act(), observe(), agent()) are part of the SDK. No extra credits, no per-token billing. The extraction runs against the live DOM in your browser session, which means it works with content that loaded after JavaScript execution, after clicks, after scrolls. There’s no separate “AI credits” line item.

Output formats

ScrapingBee returns HTML. If you need markdown for an LLM pipeline, JSON for a database, or CSV for a spreadsheet, you’re adding a parsing layer.

Spider’s API returns markdown, JSON, plain text, XML, CSV, or JSONL directly. No extra step.

Side-by-side

ScrapingBee

import requests

response = requests.get(
    "https://app.scrapingbee.com/api/v1/",
    params={
        "api_key": "YOUR_API_KEY",
        "url": "https://example.com",
        "render_js": "true",     # 5x (on by default anyway)
        "stealth_proxy": "true", # 75x
    },
)
# 75 credits consumed. You get HTML.
html = response.text
# Now parse it yourself.

Spider

import requests

response = requests.post(
    "https://api.spider.cloud/crawl",
    headers={"Authorization": "Bearer YOUR_API_KEY"},
    json={
        "url": "https://example.com",
        "return_format": "markdown",
    },
)
# Same cost regardless of the site's protection level.
# You get clean markdown, not HTML.
content = response.json()[0]["content"]

Where each tool fits

ScrapingBee is a simple, well-documented REST API. If your targets are static pages that don’t need stealth proxies and you don’t need to interact with the page, the 1-credit base rate is cheap and the API is easy to integrate.

Spider covers more ground: protected sites without credit multipliers, browser sessions for interactive workflows, AI extraction without extra cost, and output formats beyond HTML. If your scraping involves any of those (and most production scraping does), it’s a better fit.

Spider pricing. Free credits to start, no card required.