Spider vs. ZenRows

ZenRows’ Developer plan says 250,000 API credits for $69.99/month. That sounds like a lot of scraping.

Then you enable JavaScript rendering and premium proxies (which you need for basically any site with anti-bot protection) and a 25x multiplier kicks in. Those 250,000 credits become 10,000 requests. Your $70/month plan actually costs $7.00 per 1,000 pages.

This post breaks down ZenRows’ real pricing, compares it to Spider’s, and looks at independent benchmark data from Scrapeway that measures how well each service actually performs in practice.

The multiplier system

ZenRows multiplies credit costs based on the features you enable:

Source: ZenRows pricing docs

Any site using Cloudflare, DataDome, PerimeterX, or similar anti-bot protection requires both JS rendering and premium proxies. That’s most sites worth scraping in 2026.

What the plans really give you at the 25x rate:

ZenRows does not currently offer pay-as-you-go. Their docs say they’re working on it.

Even on the $500/month plan, you’re paying $2 per 1,000 pages for protected sites. And unused credits expire monthly with no rollover.

Spider charges for bytes transferred and compute time used, with no multipliers and no subscription required. The production average is about $0.65 per 1,000 pages regardless of what protection the target site runs (pricing). Credits never expire.

What Scrapeway’s benchmarks say

We built Spider, so take our performance claims with appropriate skepticism. Instead, here’s third-party data.

Scrapeway runs weekly benchmarks across scraping APIs using real targets. Their February 14-20, 2026 results for ZenRows:

• Success rate: 62.9% (industry avg: 60.3%)
• Speed: 10.4 seconds (industry avg: 9.8s)
• Cost: $5.20 per 1,000 scrapes (industry avg: $3.20)

Source: Scrapeway ZenRows benchmark, week of Feb 14-20, 2026

Not terrible across the board, but the per-site numbers tell a sharper story:

21% on Zillow. Zero on Instagram. If those are targets you need, ZenRows won’t get the job done, and you’re still paying the monthly subscription whether the requests succeed or not.

The cost-per-scrape number is also worth noting: Scrapeway measures $5.20/1K, which is higher than ZenRows’ own advertised rates. That’s because the benchmark accounts for failed requests: credits are consumed whether the request returns data or not. At a 62.9% success rate, roughly 37% of your credits produce nothing usable.

Spider’s production monitoring shows 99.9% success and sub-second response times across millions of requests. We’re not a neutral party, but those are real numbers from real traffic.

Concurrency limits

This one bites you at scale. ZenRows caps concurrent requests per plan:

Exceed the limit and you get an immediate 429 error. ZenRows doesn’t queue the overflow. And if you cancel a request, the concurrency slot can take up to 3 minutes to free up, so even your cleanup logic can get stuck.

Say you’re on the Business plan (100 concurrent) scraping a catalog of 50,000 URLs. With ZenRows’ 10.4-second average response time, each slot handles about 6 requests per minute. At 100 concurrent slots, that’s 600 requests per minute. Your 50K catalog takes ~83 minutes.

Spider handles 50,000+ requests per minute with no per-plan concurrency cap. That same catalog finishes in under a minute.

Browser and AI

ZenRows has a scraping browser product that supports Puppeteer and Playwright connections. It’s billed separately: per GB of bandwidth plus $0.09/hour of session time in 30-second increments. This is separate from the main API with its own pricing, so you’re managing two billing models.

Spider Browser also connects via WebSocket but adds natural-language AI methods on top of standard CDP:

import { SpiderBrowser } from "spider-browser";

const spider = new SpiderBrowser({
  apiKey: process.env.SPIDER_API_KEY,
  stealth: 0,
});

await spider.init();
await spider.page.goto("https://example.com/listings");

const data = await spider.page.extract(
  "Extract all listings with title, price, location, and link"
);

// Navigate with natural language instead of selectors
await spider.page.act("Click the 'Next page' button");

const page2 = await spider.page.extract(
  "Extract all listings with title, price, location, and link"
);

console.log([...data, ...page2]);
await spider.close();

extract() takes English, returns JSON. act() describes browser actions without CSS selectors. These are part of Spider Browser at no additional cost: no separate billing model, no per-GB + per-hour charges.

ZenRows’ browser gives you standard Puppeteer/Playwright access without an AI layer. All selector logic and extraction parsing is on you.

Who should use what

ZenRows works if your targets are mostly unprotected static pages. At the 1x base rate, $0.28/1K is genuinely cheap. If that describes your workload and you’re fine with a monthly subscription, ZenRows does the job.

The moment you need JS rendering and premium proxies, the economics shift. The 25x multiplier, a 62.9% success rate in independent benchmarks, 10-second response times, hard concurrency limits, and monthly credit expiration all compound. The credits you’re paying for aren’t all producing data, and the ones that fail still count against your balance.

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