ZenRows alternative in 2026: the 25x multiplier, priced out

ZenRows is a scraping API for developers who want an anti-bot toolkit behind one endpoint: JavaScript rendering, premium proxies, an adaptive stealth mode, and a browser product, all metered in credits. It repackaged its plans this year into Free, Build, Launch, Growth and Scale, each in three sizes, with a $19 entry and a standing 5,000 credit free tier. Spider is a research lab for web data quality. It returns markdown or JSON rather than HTML, crawls whole sites in one call, and bills bandwidth and compute with no per-feature multiplier.

The verdict turns on one line of ZenRows’ credit table. A plain request is 1 credit; with JavaScript rendering it is 5; with premium proxies 10; with both, 25. Most sites worth the trouble need both, so the plan you buy is worth one twenty-fifth of its headline number. On the $69 Launch plan that is 10,000 protected pages, about $6.90 per 1,000. Spider prices a hard page at the bytes and CPU minutes it took, which its pricing guide puts at about $8 to $15 per 100,000 pages in smart mode. For plain pages at small volume, ZenRows’ $19 Build plan is fine. For rendered or protected pages at any volume, Spider is the cheaper tool and the one that hands you usable data. The best ZenRows alternatives hub covers the rest of the field.

Side by side

ZenRows’ column is from its documentation as read on September 2, 2026. Spider’s is from the pricing and plans guide.

Pricing

ZenRows’ plans

ZenRows retired its Developer, Startup and Business plans and now sells four paid tiers in three sizes each. The monthly prices below are from the docs; the public pricing page shows about 17% less with a “Save 17%” badge, which we read as the annual-billing equivalent.

Prices as of September 2026, from zenrows.com/pricing. The free plan needs no card and refreshes monthly without rollover. Paid plans roll unused credits over for one month, and you can buy up to four top-ups per billing period; the price per top-up credit is not on the page. ZenRows only spends credits on successful requests and counts 404 and 410 as successes, which is the right rule and better than the earlier version of this post gave it credit for.

The credit table, from the same docs:

Adaptive Stealth Mode is “billed only for the configuration that succeeds”, so a request that ends up needing both options costs 25 no matter how it got there. Screenshots, markdown, plain text and autoparse have no separate cost listed.

Residential bandwidth is 25,000 credits per GB on every plan, so a gigabyte costs $10.56 on Build B1 and $2.00 on Scale S3; the dollar rate depends on which plan you happen to be on. Spider’s proxy mode is $1 per GB and up on every account.

At the 25 credit rate for a rendered page through premium proxies:

These are arithmetic on ZenRows’ own table, not measurements. Even on the largest plan, a protected page is $2 per 1,000, and to get there you are committing $999 a month.

Spider’s worked example

Spider bills bandwidth at $1 per GB of content transferred, measured before transformation, and compute at $0.0001 per minute of server-side processing. JavaScript rendering rolls into compute, standard proxy rotation is included, and residential and ISP pools and AI extraction are priced separately. Failed requests cost $0. Credits never expire.

The pricing guide estimates about $8 to $15 per 100,000 pages in smart mode, from $1/GB plus $0.0001 per CPU minute; failed requests cost nothing. At 10,000 pages the estimate is about $0.80 to $1.00, and at 1,000,000 pages in chrome mode with markdown and metadata it is about $80 to $160.

Set that against ZenRows. 100,000 plain pages: $39 on Build B3 versus roughly $8 to $15. 100,000 rendered pages: 500,000 credits, the $99 Launch L2 plan, versus the same $8 to $15, because rendering is compute rather than a fivefold multiplier. 100,000 rendered pages through premium proxies: 2.5 million credits, which is Growth G3 at $399, versus a Spider bill made of the bytes and CPU minutes those pages took, with the failures free on both services.

Teams that prefer a flat bill can use the Unlimited plan from $40 a month for two units of concurrency. Unlimited routes through a smaller flat-rate proxy pool and does not offer geo-targeting yet.

Benchmarks

ZenRows does not publish a success-rate methodology. Scrapeway runs a weekly panel of scraping APIs against a fixed set of real targets, and its August 14 to 28, 2026 window put ZenRows at a 15% success rate, a 2.1 second mean response, and $1.15 per 1,000 scrapes, ranking eighth of nine services. Scrapeway’s plan list for ZenRows is out of date, so its cost column reflects the old plans, and a two-week panel is a snapshot, not a verdict. It is the only third-party measurement we could find, and it is a rough one.

We have not benchmarked ZenRows ourselves, and the per-site table an earlier version of this post carried came from a Scrapeway window we can no longer cite, so it is gone. Our own published numbers are a crawl benchmark against Firecrawl and Crawl4AI on a separate corpus, linked from the Firecrawl comparison, and the Spider Browser dataset (100% pass rate on 999 URLs across 254 domains, February 2026, dataset at https://github.com/spider-rs/spider-browser-dataset). Both are our own benchmarks, not independently verified, and neither is a ZenRows comparison.

Where ZenRows wins

The free plan. 5,000 credits a month, every month, with no card. That is enough to keep a small monitor running for nothing, and Spider does not offer a standing monthly free allowance; you start at $1.

The plan grid. Twelve paid sizes from $19 to $999 means a team can buy almost exactly the volume it uses, and the one-month rollover softens a slow month. Spider’s pay as you go is simpler but does not have that pre-purchase discount structure below its credit bonus thresholds.

Adaptive Stealth Mode as a default. Set one flag and ZenRows escalates through its options and bills only the one that worked. Spider’s smart mode does the equivalent between HTTP and rendered fetches, but ZenRows’ version also folds in the proxy tier choice, and for a developer who does not want to think about it, that is a real convenience.

Batch and Browser Sessions. Batch takes 100,000 URLs per job with a webhook on completion, in beta. Browser Sessions gives a Puppeteer or Playwright endpoint, metered per minute and per GB. Both are well documented. Go SDK support is another point ZenRows has and Spider does not.

Where Spider wins

Data quality is the claim and price is evidence. Spider returns markdown, text or JSON converted on the way out, with navigation and scripts stripped, so what lands in your store is the page’s content rather than its boilerplate. ZenRows can return markdown and plain text too, and its default is still the HTML the site served.

Sites in one call. ZenRows scrapes a URL per request, and Batch is a list of URLs you already have. Spider’s crawl endpoint takes a start URL and a limit, follows links, and returns every page it finds. A documentation site or a catalog is one request instead of a discovery pass and a job.

No multiplier. Rendering is compute at $0.0001 a minute. Sites behind common bot-protection services go through stealth mode or the unblocker endpoint at the cost of their bytes and CPU time, not 25 times a base rate. Residential bandwidth is priced per GB from $1 rather than at a credit rate that ranges from $2 to $10.56 depending on plan.

Concurrency and expiry. Every Spider account starts at 10,000 requests per minute; ZenRows caps at 20 on Build, 50 on Launch, 100 on Growth and 200 on Scale. Spider credits never expire; ZenRows gives one month of rollover on paid plans and none on free.

Open engine. The crawler is spider-rs/spider, MIT licensed, and can be self-hosted. ZenRows is closed.

Migration: the same task in both SDKs

Fetch a rendered listing page through premium proxies and get markdown back.

ZenRows

import os
from zenrows import ZenRowsClient

client = ZenRowsClient(os.getenv("ZENROWS_API_KEY"))

response = client.get(
    "https://example.com/listings",
    params={
        "js_render": "true",       # 5 credits
        "premium_proxy": "true",   # 10 credits; 25 combined with js_render
    },
)
# 25 credits spent on a successful response; 404 and 410 count as success.
html = response.text
# HTML by default; convert it, or see the docs for the markdown output option.

Spider

import os
from spider import Spider

client = Spider(api_key=os.getenv("SPIDER_API_KEY"))

pages = client.scrape_url(
    "https://example.com/listings",
    params={
        "request": "smart",
        "return_format": "markdown",
    },
)
# Billed on bytes and CPU minutes; $0 if it fails.
markdown = pages[0]["content"]

Set "request": "chrome" to force rendering. To take the whole site, swap scrape_url for crawl_url and add "limit": 500.

For the browser case, Spider Browser connects over WebSocket and adds natural-language methods on top of the standard protocol, so the page-two step that needs a click does not need a selector:

import { SpiderBrowser } from "spider-browser";

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

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

const first = await spider.page.extract(
  "Extract all listings with title, price, location, and link"
);
await spider.page.act("Click the 'Next page' button");
const second = await spider.page.extract(
  "Extract all listings with title, price, location, and link"
);

console.log([...first, ...second]);
await spider.close();

ZenRows’ Browser Sessions gives you Puppeteer or Playwright and leaves the selectors and the parsing to you. Details on the Spider side are in the browser API reference.

When to pick which

Pick ZenRows when your targets are plain pages in small volume and the 5,000 credit free plan or the $19 Build plan covers them, when you want a single stealth flag that picks the proxy tier for you, or when you need a Go SDK.

Pick Spider when the pages need rendering or sit behind bot protection, when you want markdown or JSON without a parser, when the job is a site rather than a URL list, or when you would rather your bill scale with bytes and CPU time than with a 25x multiplier. Start pay as you go, and move to Unlimited if the bill settles.

The compare page has every vendor we have written up in one table, and the ScrapingBee and ScraperAPI posts cover the two APIs whose credit models sit closest to ZenRows’.

Then run the same URL through the playground. It shows the returned markdown, the mode that served it, and what that one request cost, which is the number this whole post is trying to estimate.