Affiliate disclosure: This article contains affiliate markers for Apify and Firecrawl — meaning the owner may earn a commission if you sign up through the links he adds later. No raw URLs are published here; links are added by the owner. Bright Data carries no affiliate marker here: a 50% revenue-share figure appeared in 2026 affiliate coverage, but it is unconfirmed on the official page at the time of writing, so we’re not presenting it as a verified fact.
Three vendors, three different currencies
Ask “how much does it cost to scrape 10,000 pages” and you’ll get three incompatible answers, because Apify, Firecrawl, and Bright Data don’t sell the same thing. Apify sells compute time plus proxies. Firecrawl sells credits that map almost one-to-one to pages. Bright Data sells successful records — or gigabytes of proxy bandwidth, depending on the product.
This article converts all three into one number: the documented cost of getting 10,000 pages scraped. Everything comes from published pricing sheets, checked October 2026. No pages were scraped in the making of this article, and nothing here is presented as a measured result. The math is transparent so you can rerun it with your own assumptions.
Pricing-unit explainer: what each unit actually buys
Before the table, you need to think in each vendor’s currency:
Apify — compute units + extras. One compute unit (CU) = 1 GB of RAM for one hour. Free and Starter plans pay $0.20/CU, Scale $0.16, Business $0.13. But compute is only one line: your Actor may charge its own per-result fee, residential proxies run $7–$8/GB, and storage/transfer add up. Starter is $19/month and includes $19 of credit; unused credit expires each month. The key lesson from every thorough pricing breakdown: never treat the credit balance as a fixed page allowance. The bill follows the actor, not the plan.
Firecrawl — credits per page. Scrape, crawl, map, and monitor each cost 1 credit per page. JSON extraction adds 4 credits per page; Stealth Mode (for heavily protected sites) costs 5 credits per page. A page that returns a 403 or 404 still costs 1 credit; a scrape that returns nothing is not charged. Plans: Free (1,000 credits/month), Hobby $16/month (5,000), Standard $83/month (100,000), Growth $333/month (500,000), Scale $599/month (1M). Credits don’t roll over on lower tiers; a $5 pay-as-you-go increment buys extra credits on a paid plan (1,000 on Hobby, 2,000 on Standard, 2,500 on Growth, 5,000 on Scale).
Bright Data — per successful record or per GB. Two different products: the Web Scraper API bills per successful record — PAYG at $1.50 per 1,000 records, with a free tier of 5,000 records/month and Scale at $499/month for ~384K records (then $1.30/1K). Residential proxies bill per GB — PAYG list $8/GB, with a promotional $4/GB rate in 2026 coverage. Pick the wrong product and the per-10K-page number swings wildly.
The 10,000-page cost table
Documented math, basic HTML pages (no Stealth Mode, no JSON extraction), monthly billing. Where a vendor can’t quote per-page, the table uses stated illustrative assumptions — flagged as such, not presented as measurements.
| Vendor | Cheapest documented path for 10,000 pages | Cost | Notes |
|---|---|---|---|
| Firecrawl | Hobby $16 + 5 Ă— $5 PAYG credits (5,000 + 5Ă—1,000 credits) | $41 | Exact: 10,000 credits needed, 5,000 included, 5,000 bought |
| Firecrawl | Standard $83/month (100,000 credits) | $83 | Simpler if recurring monthly; covers 10Ă— the volume |
| Apify | Starter $19 + illustrative compute | ~$23 | Assumes a lightweight 2 GB actor running 10 compute-hours (20 CU Ă— $0.20 = $4). Assumption, not a measurement |
| Apify | Same, with residential proxies | ~$183 | Same compute, plus ~20 GB proxy traffic at $8/GB — the proxy assumption is the bill |
| Bright Data | Web Scraper API PAYG: 10 Ă— $1.50/1K records | $15 | Cheapest path; free tier covers the first 5K records/month |
| Bright Data | Residential proxies PAYG: ~20 GB Ă— $8/GB | ~$160 | List rate; promotional $4/GB halves it while active |
Read the table twice. Bright Data’s $15 is the managed Scraper API — Bright Data handles unblocking, you buy successful records. Apify’s $23 is compute-only on the $19 Starter subscription; the moment targets need residential proxies, the same workload is $183. Firecrawl’s $41 is the only number that’s truly per-page with no hidden lines — credits expire monthly on lower tiers, but the budgeting is honest.
The real story: for simple, unprotected pages, all three are cheap — under $85. The cost explosion lives in proxy bandwidth and anti-bot protection, which is what the next section is about.
The honesty section: bans, proxies, and when scraping isn’t worth it
Proxy costs dominate everything. In the table above, moving Apify or Bright Data from datacenter IPs to residential proxies multiplied the 10,000-page bill by roughly 8Ă—. Before you budget, know whether your targets ban datacenter IPs. If they do, budget the proxy line first and treat compute as a rounding error.
Burned pages are paid pages. Firecrawl charges 1 credit for a 403 or 404 — only a completely empty scrape is free. On hostile targets with high block rates, your effective cost per successful page can double or triple. Model your block rate, not just your page count.
Check for an API before you scrape. Every scraping vendor will happily sell you 10,000 page credits for data the target publishes through a documented API for free. Shopify stores, job boards, real-estate portals — check first. Scraping what an API gives away is the most expensive kind of free data.
Respect ToS; budget legal risk as cost. Apify’s own ecosystem is explicit that it isn’t legal cover for every site. Scraping a site that forbids it can get accounts banned and pipelines dead mid-month — turning a $41 bill into a rebuild.
Credits expire; PAYG has floors. Firecrawl’s monthly credits don’t roll over on Hobby/Standard/Growth — bursty workloads waste them. Apify’s prepaid monthly credits also expire. Bright Data’s free Scraper API tier is 5K records/month — a test plan, not production. And Bright Data’s residential-proxy onboarding requires business verification; it’s the only vendor here with a gate before you start.
When scraping isn’t worth it: if targets are heavily protected (Cloudflare, Akamai, aggressive CAPTCHAs), stealth rendering and premium proxies can push you toward $150–$300 per 10K pages — at which point a dataset, a licensed feed, or an official API is usually cheaper than fighting the arms race yourself.
Affiliate rates: what’s verified and what isn’t
- Apify: verified in Apify’s published affiliate program terms — 20% of a referred customer’s payments for the first 3 months, then 30%, capped at $2,500 per customer (Starter tier) or $5,000 (Performer tier, 50+ active referrals; effective August 1, 2026). Apify
- Firecrawl: reported in 2026 affiliate coverage — 25% for 12 months, then 15% while subscribed, via the Dub platform, standard plans only. Re-verify before publishing expectations. Firecrawl
- Bright Data: a 50% revenue-share figure appeared in 2026 coverage, but the cap is stated inconsistently ($1,000 in one place, $2,500 in another), and we could not confirm the rate on the official page at the time of writing. Treat it as unconfirmed.
AWL verdict: For 10,000 simple pages, the documented math puts Bright Data’s Web Scraper API cheapest at $15 PAYG, Firecrawl most predictable at $41 on Hobby + PAYG credits, and Apify cheapest for compute ($23 on Starter) only while targets tolerate datacenter IPs — the moment they don’t, proxies push Apify to ~$183. Our default for a solo founder: Firecrawl for honest per-page budgeting with zero infrastructure thinking; Bright Data’s Scraper API if your targets are protected and you’d rather buy successful records than fight bans; Apify if you want reusable Actors and scheduled pipelines and can live with compute-unit math. And before any of them — check for an API. Scraping data someone gives away is the most expensive mistake on this page.
FAQ
How much does it cost to scrape 10,000 pages with Firecrawl?
$41 documented: Hobby at $16/month (5,000 credits) plus five $5 pay-as-you-go increments (1,000 credits each on Hobby). One credit = one page on a basic scrape. Standard at $83/month is simpler if it’s a recurring monthly workload.
How much does Apify cost per 10,000 pages?
Apify doesn’t publish per-page pricing — it bills compute units ($0.20/CU on Starter), actor fees, proxies, and storage. An illustrative lightweight workload comes to roughly $23 on Starter, but residential proxies (~$8/GB) can push the same 10,000 pages toward $183. Your actor and your targets decide the bill.
Is Bright Data cheaper than Apify and Firecrawl?
On the Web Scraper API’s PAYG rate ($1.50/1K successful records), 10,000 pages is about $15 — cheapest of the three for basic scraping. But proxy products bill per GB ($8/GB list), and committed plans start at $499/month. “Bright Data” is several products; compare product-by-product.
Do Firecrawl credits roll over?
Not on Hobby, Standard, or Growth — monthly credits expire at the end of the billing cycle. Rollover applies on Scale and Enterprise annual plans, and auto-recharge PAYG credits behave differently. For bursty workloads, this is the single most common complaint.
What’s the catch with Apify’s $19 Starter plan?
The $19 is prepaid usage credit, not a flat fee for unlimited scraping — unused credit expires monthly, and overage continues on pay-as-you-go. The plan price is a credit balance, not a cap on your bill.
When should I not scrape at all?
When the target offers an API, when the data is sold as a dataset cheaper than your proxy bill, when ToS forbid it, or when protection is so heavy that stealth rendering and premium proxies push your per-page cost past the value of the data. Check the API first — always.
Methodology
No scraping was performed for this article and no vendor accounts were exercised — all figures come from published pricing pages and third-party breakdowns that cite them, re-checked October 2026. The 10,000-page table multiplies published unit prices by stated assumptions: Firecrawl’s math is exact (1 credit/page on basic scrapes, with documented PAYG increment sizes); Apify’s compute figure is illustrative (2 GB actor, 10 compute-hours — an assumption, not a measurement); Bright Data’s proxy row assumes ~2 MB of traffic per page. Affiliate rates: Apify’s verified against published program terms; Firecrawl’s reported in 2026 coverage and flagged for re-verification; Bright Data’s reported-but-unconfirmed figure is not presented as fact. Prices move fast here — confirm at the source before budgeting.
Sources
- Apify pricing plans and compute-unit rates — checked Sept 2026
- Web scraping tools comparison — Apify plan caveats
- Firecrawl pricing breakdown — plans, credits, rollover
- Firecrawl plan tiers and credit rates — June 2026
- Firecrawl billing FAQ — credits per endpoint, PAYG increments
- Bright Data product billing shapes and PAYG rates
- Residential proxy PAYG comparison — Bright Data $8/GB list rate, Sept 2026
- Apify affiliate program terms — 20% → 30%, caps
- 2026 affiliate coverage — Apify, Firecrawl, Bright Data rates
