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Which scraping API free tiers are actually free, and what expires?

A source-by-source comparison of recurring free scraping API plans, one-time trials, card requirements, expiry rules, rate limits, and feature locks.

Written against 74 products106 cited sourcesUpdated 2026-07-26

The dataset behind this guide

Products priced74
Latest recorded source date2026-07-26
Guide last reviewed2026-07-26
Sources cited below106

What is calculated and what is checked. This guide is not a market ranking, so it carries no computed winner: the site's market band prices 100,000 JavaScript-rendered pages a month, and quoting it here would answer a question this page never asked. The prose below is written by a person. Each money figure is checked against the dated vendor price stored with this guide, but that does not mean the vendor page was freshly rechecked. A mismatch must be explained by the shown arithmetic or another cited vendor fact, or the page is not published.

Bright Data Web Unlocker offers 5,000 requests every month with no card required (pricing, retrieved 2026-07-26). Failed deliveries do not consume the allowance (billing, retrieved 2026-07-26).

Monthly and other recurring free allowances

Monthly and other recurring free allowances table

Vendor Free allowance and period Card What the free tier cannot do, or the important catch Source and retrieval date
Anchor Browser 5 credits each month. Completed tasks cost 0.1 credit, so the headline balance represents 50 completed tasks before other infrastructure charges. No Free allows 5 concurrent browsers, 5 session creations per minute, 120 AI steps, and 10 million AI tokens per task. Failure treatment across task and infrastructure billing is not fully published. Pricing and billing docs, retrieved 2026-07-25
Apify $5 of platform usage each month. No The $5 expires monthly. Runs can consume compute, storage, transfer, proxy, or Actor-specific charges, and failed runs can still consume resources. Free is capped at 25 concurrent runs and 16 GB of Actor memory. Pricing and resource billing, retrieved 2026-07-26
Brave Search API $5 of Search API credit each month. Yes The free-credit program is associated with public attribution. Standard terms prohibit building a stored database, redistribution, resale, sublicensing, and AI training or benchmarking with results. Pricing and terms, retrieved 2026-07-26
Bright Data SERP API 5,000 requests each month. No This is a search-results API, not a general page scraper. The public plan advertises unlimited concurrency and charges only successful responses; unused-request rollover is not published. Pricing and billing, retrieved 2026-07-26
Bright Data Web Unlocker and Web Scraper API 5,000 Web Unlocker requests each month, plus a separate 5,000-record Web Scraper API allowance. No The two allowances use different units and cannot be pooled. Web Unlocker is request-in, response-out rather than an interactive remote browser. Failed Web Unlocker deliveries are not charged and concurrency is advertised as unlimited. Unlocker pricing, Scraper pricing, and billing, retrieved 2026-07-26
Browse AI 50 credits each month. No Free covers 2 websites and up to 3 users. Credits do not roll over, retained data is deleted after 90 days, and a premium-site task can consume between 2 and 10 credits rather than 1. The exact site-specific multiplier is not published. Plan guide, credit guide, and pricing, retrieved 2026-07-25
Browserbase 1 browser hour, 1,000 Search calls, 1,000 Fetch calls, 3 Agent runs, and 3 concurrent browsers each month. No Each created browser session has a 1-minute minimum. Free data retention is 7 days, and success-only billing is not published for Search, Fetch, or Extract calls. Pricing and cost guide, retrieved 2026-07-25
BrowserCloud 1,000 credits each month, shown as 1 browser hour, 1,000 page scrapes, 200 screenshots, 200 PDFs, 0.1 GB of datacenter traffic, or 0.01 GB of residential traffic. Not published Free sessions are limited to 15 minutes and retained for 7 days. The vendor does not publish failure billing, overage pricing, or how simultaneous meters combine. Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-25
Browserless 1,000 Units each month. No Free allows 2 concurrent browsers, 1-minute sessions, and 1 day of persisted sessions and logs. Time, proxy traffic, and CAPTCHA work draw from the same allowance; the cloud-browser billing guide owns the worked Unit calculation. Pricing and unit billing, retrieved 2026-07-26
Decodo Web Scraping API 2,000 standard results each month, or 1,000 JavaScript results, 1,000 premium results, or 667 premium-plus-JavaScript results. No Plan rate limits begin at 10 requests per second. Decodo retries internally and charges successful results, but the exact billable HTTP status-code list is not published. Pricing and billing introduction, retrieved 2026-07-26
Diffbot 10,000 credits each month. No Free is limited to 5 calls per minute. Credits do not roll over, Crawl access is locked to Plus and higher, and failure billing for direct Extract calls is not explicit. Pricing, credit rules, rate limits, and Crawl lock, retrieved 2026-07-25
Exa $20 of signup credit, then $10 of recurring credit each month. Not published Self-serve rate limits and failed-search billing are not published. Public terms restrict copying, distribution, publication, licensing, or sale of service output, and zero data retention is listed as an enterprise feature. Pricing and terms, retrieved 2026-07-26
Firecrawl 1,000 credits each month, plus 5 free browser hours and 5 Agent runs per day. No Plan credits do not roll over. Interact sessions remain billable until stopped or expired, with a 10-minute default time-to-live and a 5-minute inactivity timeout. The fixed credit cost of Agent is not published. Pricing and Interact limits, retrieved 2026-07-25
HasData 1,000 credits each month. No Free allows 1 concurrent request. The page does not publish rollover behavior, so unused-credit expiry remains unknown. Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-26
Hyperbrowser 5,000 credits each month. No Free allows 1 concurrent browser and retains data for 7 days. Subscription credits refresh on renewal; directly purchased credits expire after 12 months. Failure billing is not published. Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-25
Jina AI Reader and Search Reader works without a key at 20 requests per minute; no monthly no-key token allowance is published. No Search is unavailable without an API key. Free-key Search is shown at 100 requests per minute, while no-key Reader is 20 per minute. Paying raises throughput but does not bypass sites that block Jina. Reader access and limits, retrieved 2026-07-25
Kernel $5 of usage credit each month. No Free includes 5 concurrent browsers, 5 concurrent app invocations, and 7-day replay retention. The pricing page and docs disagree on whether headless usage is metered per GB-second or browser-second, so the $5 cannot be translated reliably into a browser-hour count. Pricing and billing docs, retrieved 2026-07-25
Lightpanda Cloud 10 browser hours each month. No Explorer allows 5 concurrent sessions and requires a bring-your-own proxy. Lightpanda is headless and does not provide graphical rendering; billing rounding and failed-session treatment are not published. Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-25
Linkup $20 of credit, topped back up to $20 each month. Not published Public rate limits are not published. The page does not state whether paid prepaid credit expires. Pricing docs, retrieved 2026-07-26
Parallel Web Systems Search API $5 of credit each month, described as up to 1,000 requests depending on the processor. Yes The credit expires monthly and Search processors are limited to 600 requests per minute. Terms restrict caching or reusing one query’s output for multiple end customers, building a data-selling product, and AI-model training. Pricing and customer terms, retrieved 2026-07-26
Scale SERP 125 searches each month. No Current Traject Data terms describe products and services as personal-use only and prohibit resale. The page does not publish rollover behavior. Pricing and terms, retrieved 2026-07-26
ScrapeNinja 500 non-JavaScript requests and 50 JavaScript requests each month. Not published Basic is a hard-capped RapidAPI plan. Published rate limits begin at 20 requests per minute, and failed-request billing is not published. RapidAPI pricing, retrieved 2026-07-26
ScrapeOps 1,000 credits each month. No Free is limited to 1 concurrent request. Credits do not roll over, there is no pay-as-you-go overage, and exhaustion triggers the configured auto-renew, upgrade, or block behavior. Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-26
ScrapingAnt 10,000 credits each month. No Credits do not roll over. The current records could not establish a reliable numeric concurrency limit, and the rendered-request capacity claim conflicts with the billing documentation. Pricing and credit rules, retrieved 2026-07-26
ScrapingBot The plan grid lists 1,000 credits each month. No A later FAQ on the same page says new accounts receive 100 credits instead. The recurring amount is therefore in conflict and should be verified in the account before planning a workload. Homepage and plan grid, retrieved 2026-07-26
ScrapingDog 200 credits each month. No Free is limited to 1 concurrent request and unused credits do not roll over. The docs do not define how endpoint, country, AI, rendering, and proxy costs combine. Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-26
Scrappa 500 credits each month after email verification. No Free-credit rollover is not published. Separately purchased packs are valid for 12 months and do not auto-renew. Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-26
SerpApi 250 searches each month. Not published Free throughput is 50 searches per hour. The page does not state whether unused searches roll over. Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-26
serpstack 100 searches each month. Not published The pricing page does not publish rollover behavior or a free-plan overage rule. Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-26
Tavily 1,000 credits each month. No Tavily advertises zero data retention, but failed-search billing and unused-credit rollover are not explicitly documented. Credit guide, retrieved 2026-07-26
WebScraping.AI 2,000 credits each month. No Free allows 2 concurrent connections. The page does not publish unused-credit rollover behavior. Product and pricing page, retrieved 2026-07-26
Zenserp 50 searches each month, with all SERP types included. Not published The page does not publish a rate limit or say whether unused searches roll over. Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-26

A recurring allowance is useful only when its meter and restrictions match the job, so the tables separate renewable plans from credits that expire or have no published renewal rule. These renew monthly unless the cadence column says otherwise. “Expires” means unused allowance resets instead of rolling over.

“Card required” means the vendor explicitly requires one to receive the free allowance. “Not published” is not treated as “no.” A credit, request, result, browser minute, and dollar balance are also kept separate because they buy different amounts of work.

One-time signup balances and trials

These do not renew monthly. If a vendor publishes no expiry date, the honest answer is “not published,” not “never expires.”

One-time signup balances and trials table

Vendor Free allowance and expiry Card What it cannot do, or the important catch Source and retrieval date
AgentQL 300 API calls and 1 remote-browser hour, one time. No expiry date is published. No Trial access is limited to 1 concurrent remote-browser session and 10 API calls per minute. Failure billing and the interaction between extraction and browser-time charges are not published. Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-25
Browsable 100 trial credits, one time. No expiry date is published. Not published The page does not publish what one credit buys in a general unit that can be compared with other vendors. Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-26
Crawlbase Up to 20,000 Crawling API requests, one time. No expiry date is published. No The exact paid rate depends on Crawlbase’s assigned domain-complexity tier, and general Crawling API concurrency is not published. Failed and blocked retrievals are not charged when no page content is delivered. Pricing and docs, retrieved 2026-07-26
DataForSEO SERP API $1 of registration credit, one time. The balance-expiry rule is not published. No Continuing after the trial requires a minimum $50 account deposit even when calculated usage is lower. Funds reserved for failed or errored tasks are returned. Pricing and billing, retrieved 2026-07-26
Desearch $5 of API credit on signup, one time. No expiry date is published. Not published The reviewed page does not publish the card requirement or a universal request count for the dollar balance. Credit page, retrieved 2026-07-26
Nimble 5,000 page credits, one time. No trial-expiry date is published. No Paid Data Services plans are annual, monthly plan credits expire rather than roll over, and request-concurrency limits are not published. Pricing docs, retrieved 2026-07-26
Olostep 500 requests, one time, including JavaScript rendering and residential IPs. No trial-expiry date is published. No The extra model charge for Answers is not published. Purchased top-up packs expire after 6 months. Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-25
Scavio 50 credits, one time. No expiry date is published. No Standard Search costs 1 credit and Deep Search costs 2 credits, so the grant covers different query counts by mode. Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-26
ScrapeGraphAI 500 credits, one time. No expiry date is published. Not published Free is limited to 10 requests per minute, 1 monitor, and 1 concurrent crawl. Failure billing is not published. Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-25
ScrapeLens 1,000 credits, described as 50 requests, one time. No expiry date is published. No The documented conversion is 20 credits per basic request. Documentation, retrieved 2026-07-26
Scrapeless A one-time free trial with no published dollar value or expiry date. No The amount is unknown, so the current data cannot produce a request count or a free-workload calculation. Billing FAQ, retrieved 2026-07-26
ScrapeOwl 1,000 credits, one time. No expiry date is published. No A basic request costs 1 credit, JavaScript costs 5, residential proxy use costs 10, and rendered premium proxy use costs 25. Pricing and request costs, retrieved 2026-07-26
Scrapfly 1,000 credits, one time. No trial-expiry date is published. No Credits do not roll over, and default pay-as-you-go usage is capped at 125% of the monthly quota after upgrading. Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-26
Scraping Robot 5,000 free scrapes, one time. No expiry date is published. Not published The page says all features are included, but it does not publish whether a card is required for the grant. Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-26
ScrapingBee 1,000 credits, one time. No expiry date is published. No JavaScript rendering is enabled by default and costs 5 credits, so the default request shape buys 200 pages, not 1,000. Credits do not roll over after moving to a monthly plan. Pricing and credit rules, retrieved 2026-07-26
ScrapingFish A free starter balance can be enabled on request, one time; the amount and expiry are not published. Not published Default concurrency is 25 requests per target domain. Geotargeting is limited to Poland or the European Union, and the service does not offer automatic CAPTCHA or anti-bot bypass. Product page, retrieved 2026-07-26
Search1API 100 credits, one time, and the grant does not expire. No The grant covers up to 100 successful basic searches. The free page does not provide a universal request conversion for every endpoint. Free-search page, retrieved 2026-07-26
SearchApi.io 100 requests on signup, one time. No expiry date is published. No Users may not resell or redistribute the service without written consent. Standard cache-retention duration and unused-request rollover are not published. Pricing and terms, retrieved 2026-07-26
Serper.dev 2,500 queries on signup, one time. Signup-credit expiry is not published. No Purchased credits expire 6 months after purchase. Paid package limits range from 50 to 300 queries per second. Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-26
Spider.cloud A free signup balance, one time; its amount and expiry are not published. No Geolocation is not included in the advertised unlimited mode, and AI features remain separately metered. The pricing page contains an unresolved mismatch between its Unlimited headline and concurrency scale. Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-26
Steel.dev $30 of one-time credit, valid for 90 days. Not published Launch is limited to 10 concurrent sessions, 15-minute sessions, 60 requests per minute, 3 seats, and 7-day retention. Current browser-hour, proxy, CAPTCHA, and scrape rates are not publicly readable, so the $30 cannot be converted into a dependable workload. Pricing update, retrieved 2026-07-25
Valyu 10 credits on signup, or 20 with a work email, one time. No expiry date is published. No The page does not publish one universal request conversion for the credit balance. Pricing documentation, retrieved 2026-07-26
WebScrapingAPI 5,000 requests, one time. No trial-expiry date is published. No Trial concurrency is 5. The current pricing table and first-party quick-start guide disagree on plan names and allowances; billable status codes are not published. Pricing and quick-start guide, retrieved 2026-07-26
ZenRows $1 of trial credit, one time, equivalent to 1,000 basic results, 200 JavaScript results, 100 premium-proxy results, or 40 protected results. No expiry date is published. No Response-size limits vary by plan, and first-party pages disagree on the highest plan’s allowance and concurrency. Pricing docs, retrieved 2026-07-26

Daily allowances, timed trials, and unclear renewal

These offers are free in the current records, but they are not clean monthly plans.

Daily allowances, timed trials, and unclear renewal table

Vendor Free allowance and period Card What it cannot do, or the important catch Source and retrieval date
Bright Data Browser API A 7-day trial. Included bandwidth or credit amount is not published. Not published Each session supports one initial navigation, there is no REST connection method, premium-domain rates are not public, and failure refund behavior is not published. Product page and FAQ, retrieved 2026-07-25
Cloudflare Browser Rendering 10 browser minutes per day, with 3 concurrent browsers. No This is a daily cap, not a monthly bank. Cloudflare documents non-billing for a specific waitForTimeout failure, but treatment of other failure types is not published. Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-25
Google Custom Search JSON API 100 queries per day for existing customers. Not published The API is closed to new customers, paid usage is capped at 10,000 queries per day, and the service is scheduled for discontinuation on January 1, 2027. Official overview, retrieved 2026-07-26
Kadoa A no-commitment evaluation period. Size, duration, unit, and expiry are not published. Not published Flex pricing, concurrency, retention, overage behavior, and failure billing are also not public. This cannot be planned as a numerical free tier. Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-25
Oxylabs SERP Scraper API 1,000 Google results in the billing guide, while the product page advertises up to 2,000 results across targets. Trial duration is not published. No Free is limited to 10 jobs per second, with lower rendered-job limits. A domain below 40% success over the preceding 5 minutes may be throttled to 1 request per second. Trial billing and rate limits, retrieved 2026-07-26
Scrape.do 1,000 credits. The renewal period and expiry are not published. No Free is limited to 5 concurrent requests. A basic request can cost 1 credit, JavaScript 5, Google 10, and LinkedIn 30, so the same balance buys very different job counts. Pricing and request costs, retrieved 2026-07-26
ScraperAPI 5,000 credits for 7 days, followed by a separate ongoing free plan with 1,000 credits each month and 5 concurrent requests. No Unused credits do not roll over, excess concurrency returns HTTP 429, and feature or target multipliers can cut the page count sharply. Pricing and credit costs, retrieved 2026-07-26
SERPHouse 4,000 credits for 7 days. No The trial allows 60 concurrent requests. The search meter is 10 credits, so the grant represents 400 searches at that published rate. Pricing and credit update, retrieved 2026-07-26
SerpWow A free trial whose size, duration, unit conversion, and expiry are not published. Not published Current Traject Data terms describe products and services as personal-use only and prohibit resale. The missing search-to-credit billing unit prevents useful arithmetic. Product page and terms, retrieved 2026-07-26
ValueSERP A free no-card trial whose size, duration, unit conversion, and expiry are not published. No Current Traject Data terms describe products and services as personal-use only and prohibit resale. The pricing page also contains a conflict between the entry plan’s displayed total and per-1,000 rate. Product page and terms, retrieved 2026-07-26
You.com API 100 calls per day, plus $100 of complimentary credit for new API accounts with no published duration or eligibility details. No The acceptable-use policy restricts copying or storing significant portions of API content for reuse without a separate agreement. Failed-call billing is not published. Pricing and acceptable-use policy, retrieved 2026-07-26
Zyte API $5 of credit for 30 days. Not published Standard rate limit is 3,000 requests per minute, but extended residential geolocation can add bandwidth charges. The pricing model uses tier selection plus add-ons, so $5 does not translate into one universal request count. Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-26

Worked example: which free tier covers a small production job?

BrowserCloud gives a checkable recurring page-fetch example because its Free tier contains 1,000 credits per month and its basic page-scrape meter is 1 credit per page. Assume a monitor needs 30 basic page scrapes per day for a 30-day month. (Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-25.)

monthly pages = 30 pages/day × 30 days = 900 pages
page credits = 900 pages × 1 credit/page = 900 credits
credits left = 1,000 − 900 = 100 credits
headroom = 100 ÷ 1,000 = 10%

largest even daily schedule = floor(1,000 ÷ 30) = 33 pages/day
33 pages/day × 30 days = 990 credits, leaving 10
34 pages/day × 30 days = 1,020 credits, exceeding the tier by 20

The 30-page daily schedule therefore fits, while a uniform 34-page daily schedule does not. This conclusion applies only to basic page scrapes. BrowserCloud also publishes 5 credits per screenshot, so a separate screenshot-only check is equally direct. (Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-25.)

30 screenshots × 5 credits/screenshot = 150 credits
1,000 − 150 = 850 credits left in a screenshot-only month

Do not add that 850-credit remainder to the page-scrape result. The pricing page presents browser time, page scrapes, screenshots, PDFs, and proxy traffic as alternative maximums from one shared pool, but it does not publish how simultaneous meters combine. Failure billing and overage pricing are also unpublished. (Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-25.)

Offers not counted as free

Offers not counted as free table

Vendor Why it is excluded Source and retrieval date
Microsoft Bing Search API The standalone APIs were retired and decommissioned on August 11, 2025. Retirement notice, retrieved 2026-07-26
Browser Use Cloud Pay As You Go has no subscription fee, but requires a credit purchase of $25, $50, $100, or $500. Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-25
Kagi Search API A historical $5 preview credit is not a currently published durable free tier. Changelog, retrieved 2026-07-26
Oxylabs Web Scraper API No free self-serve allowance is published. This is separate from the Oxylabs SERP trial listed above. Pricing, retrieved 2026-07-26
Perplexity Search API No recurring free Search API allowance is published. Pricing docs, retrieved 2026-07-26
SOAX Web Data API The trial costs $1.99 for 3 days, so it is discounted, not free. Product page, retrieved 2026-07-26

The safest buying rule is to reject any “free” label that lacks one of four facts: the numerical allowance, its renewal or expiry date, the card requirement, and the meter for the exact request shape. If any one is unpublished, test access can still be useful, but it is not a dependable production budget.

Sources