ScrapingAnt
ScrapingAnt is a web scraping API that fetches pages through headless Chrome and rotating proxies and returns HTML, Markdown or extracted JSON, for developers and growth teams pulling web data at volume.
Updated October 2026
Overview: What is ScrapingAnt?
A free plan gives 10,000 credits a month, and paid plans start at $19 a month for 100,000 credits on Enthusiast (checked October 2026).
You send a URL to one endpoint with your API key, and ScrapingAnt runs the request in a fresh Chrome instance behind its proxy pool, which it puts at more than 3 million IPs in 100+ countries. There's no concurrency cap on any plan. For a revenue team it's a building block rather than a lead tool: a developer uses it to pull directories, pricing pages or job posts into Clay, a sheet or a warehouse.
Fit: Ideal customer profile.
Developers, data engineers and technical growth teams who write their own scrapers and want proxies and rendering handled, on a small budget. It's a weaker fit for heavily protected sites: in one independent benchmark of 16 scraping APIs on 100 bot-protected sites, run in September 2026 by a competing vendor, ScrapingAnt returned the page 36.4% of the time, the lowest of the group.
- Low-cost scraping of lightly protected sites
- Feeding web data to AI agents
Capabilities
Key features.
01
One endpoint with headless Chrome, custom JavaScript snippets and wait-for-selector
02
Datacenter and residential proxies, with country targeting per request
03
LLM-ready Markdown output and an AI extractor that returns JSON from a plain-English prompt
04
Unlimited parallel requests on every plan
05
Hosted MCP server with HTML, Markdown and text tools
06
Standalone residential and datacenter proxies, billed by the GB
Usage
How to use ScrapingAnt.
Sign up for a free key, then call the /v2/general endpoint with the target URL. Pick the cheapest settings that work: a plain request on a datacenter proxy costs 1 credit, Chrome rendering 10 and rendering on a residential proxy 125. The Ant-credits-cost header shows what each call spent, and only successful responses are charged. It's plain HTTP, so Python, Node or curl all work, and the MCP server lets an AI coding agent fetch pages directly.
Cost
Pricing.
$19/ month
Monthly prices as listed on scrapingant.com (checked October 2026). Credits reset each month and don't roll over. A request costs 1 to 125 credits by proxy type and rendering, so Startup's 500,000 credits buy 500,000 plain fetches but 4,000 rendered pages on residential proxies.
Free
$0.00
- 10,000 credits a month
- No credit card
Enthusiast
$19.00
- 100,000 credits a month
- Docs-only integration help
Startup
$49.00
- 500,000 credits a month
- Custom code snippets
Business
$249.00
- 3,000,000 credits a month
- Debug sessions
Business Pro
$599.00
- 8,000,000 credits a month
- Priority debug sessions
Custom
- 10M+ credits a month
- From $699 a month
At a glance
Quick facts.
- Stack position
- Enrichment
- Category
- Data Sources
- Best for
- Low-cost scraping of lightly protected sites, Feeding web data to AI agents
- Pricing
- From $19/month
Subcategories
- Web Scrapers
Questions
Frequently asked.
How much does ScrapingAnt cost?
The free plan gives 10,000 credits a month without a card. Paid plans are $19 for 100,000 credits, $49 for 500,000, $249 for 3 million and $599 for 8 million a month, with custom plans from $699 (checked October 2026).
How are ScrapingAnt credits counted?
By request settings: 1 credit for a plain fetch on a datacenter proxy, 10 with Chrome rendering, 25 on a residential proxy and 125 for rendering on a residential proxy. Google requests cost 10. The homepage says most requests cost 1 to 25 credits, but the docs table is what bills you.
Does ScrapingAnt have an MCP server?
Yes. One command adds it to Claude Code, Cursor or Windsurf, with three tools that return a page as HTML, Markdown or text, paid from your plan's credits.
What are ScrapingAnt's limits?
Protected sites are the weak spot: the same independent benchmark had it returning 4.2% of DataDome-protected and 8.0% of Cloudflare-protected pages. Rendering on residential proxies at 125 credits makes hard pages expensive, and unused credits expire monthly.
What are the alternatives to ScrapingAnt?
ScraperAPI and ScrapingBee returned far more protected pages in that benchmark, ZenRows has a free plan and an MCP server, Apify rents prebuilt scrapers for named sites, and Bright Data sells proxy scale with more compliance paperwork.
Compare
ScrapingAnt alternatives.
Talk to us: Pick the tool. We run the system around it.
ScrapingAnt is one part of a stack. We build and run the revenue system it plugs into.
Talk to Phi