Spider pricing and plans: what you pay and why

Spider uses a pay-as-you-go model. You buy credits, spend them on requests, and they never expire. Pay as you go has no monthly subscription, no seat limits, and no hidden fees. Spider also offers Unlimited, a monthly concurrency plan, and AI Studio add ons. Both are optional and separate from your credit balance.

This guide covers how billing works, what each endpoint costs, and how to estimate your spend.

How billing works

Every API request is billed on two components:

• Bandwidth: $1 per GB of content transferred (measured on pre-transformation bytes)
• Compute: $0.0001 per minute of server-side processing time, one credit a minute, pro-rated to the millisecond

Failed requests cost nothing. If Spider returns an error, you are not charged.

Credits are purchased in US dollars at a rate of 10,000 credits per $1. You can start with as little as $1.

How minutes are metered

The meter is the same for the scraping API and the cloud browser, and these are the constants the billing code compiles in.

• $1 buys 10,000 credits, so one credit is $0.0001.
• Bandwidth is bytes transferred, divided by 1,000,000,000, times 10,000 credits. That is $1 per decimal gigabyte, counted on the bytes before any transformation.
• Compute is elapsed milliseconds divided by 60,000. One credit per minute, pro-rated to the millisecond, with no rounding up to the next minute. A 12 second request is 0.2 credits.
• An API request’s compute stops at 30 credits ($0.003), or at 50 credits ($0.005) when the request needed a headless browser.

A browser session bills the same two terms every 3 seconds while it is open, from init() to close(), with a last tick at close for the remainder. Recording a session multiplies the compute term by 1.15 and leaves bandwidth alone. A single tick’s compute stops at 50 credits. About every 30 seconds the server checks your balance, and at zero it ends the session.

Model calls made by act(), extract() and agent() are billed by your model provider, not by Spider. A failed API request costs nothing.

If you meter a session yourself and your numbers disagree with your invoice, that is a bug. Tell us.

Per-endpoint cost estimates

These are average costs per request. Actual cost depends on page size and rendering time.

Request modes and their cost impact

Spider supports three request modes. The mode you choose affects compute time and cost.

For most scraping workloads, smart mode gives the best balance between cost and reliability. Use http when you know the target serves static HTML. Use browser when you need full JavaScript execution on every page.

Set the mode with the request parameter:

import requests, os

headers = {
    'Authorization': f'Bearer {os.getenv("SPIDER_API_KEY")}',
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
}

response = requests.post('https://api.spider.cloud/crawl',
  headers=headers,
  json={
    "url": "https://example.com",
    "limit": 100,
    "return_format": "markdown",
    "request": "smart"
  }
)

Add-ons

Some features add a small per-request cost on top of the base billing:

Volume discounts

Larger purchases add bonus credits automatically:

For volumes above $4,000 or custom requirements, contact sales for tailored pricing.

Enterprise

Enterprise customers get custom SLAs, dedicated support, and volume pricing. Key capabilities include:

• Unlimited concurrency
• Global proxy network across 199+ countries
• Smart browser escalation and stealth mode
• Webhooks, streaming, and S3-compatible storage integration
• Dedicated account management

Visit the enterprise page or email sales@spider.cloud to discuss your needs.

Cost estimation examples

Here are three common workloads with estimated monthly costs.

Small project (10K pages/month, static sites) Using HTTP mode on mostly text-heavy pages averaging 50KB each. Estimated cost: ~$0.80-$1.00/month.

Mid-scale pipeline (100K pages/month, mixed sites) Using Smart mode with a mix of static and JavaScript-rendered pages. Estimated cost: ~$8-$15/month.

Production RAG pipeline (1M pages/month) Crawling diverse sources with Chrome mode, markdown output, and metadata extraction. Estimated cost: ~$80-$160/month.

These estimates assume average page sizes. Heavy pages (media-rich content, large DOMs) will cost more due to higher bandwidth.

How Spider compares

Spider’s pay-as-you-go model avoids the subscription traps common in the scraping industry. If you would rather pay one monthly price for concurrency, Unlimited is there, and it is a choice, not a floor.

Spider has no credit multipliers. A request costs the same whether it uses proxies, JavaScript rendering, or AI extraction. With other providers, enabling features like JS rendering or premium proxies can multiply the credit cost of each request by 5-75x.

Getting started

1. Create an account (email or GitHub).
2. Purchase credits starting at $1.
3. Generate an API key.
4. Start scraping.

curl -X POST https://api.spider.cloud/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SPIDER_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://example.com", "return_format": "markdown"}'

Credits never expire. Use them whenever you need them.