JavaScript rendering
JavaScript rendering runs the page in a real browser so client-side content exists to scrape. 5 of the 42 providers Proxy Compare tracks offer it, read 5 Oct 2026. It multiplies both the bandwidth and the credit cost of a request, which is why it is a dearer tier.
Why it costs you money
It is the difference between a page and an empty shell, and it is billed as a premium. ZenRows draws 5 credits for a rendered request against 1 for a plain one, and ScrapingBee enables it by default so a basic request already costs 5. The need is not hypothetical: collecting evidence for this site, one vendor's terms page returned 1.9 MB of HTML and zero characters of readable text until a browser ran it. If the pages you want are built this way, the rendered rate is your real rate.
See it in the data
Related terms
- Credit (scraping API)Scraping APIs bill in credits, and one credit buys different amounts of work depending on the request. What each provider charges, with sources.
- Success-only billingCompare successful-request billing policies, including chargeable errors, early cancellations and failed-request protection.
- Concurrency limitThe cap on how many requests you can have in flight at once. Often the real constraint on a scraping job, not price.
- CAPTCHA rateHow often a target serves a challenge instead of the page. A softer signal than a ban and it costs the same bytes.
- Every term we define
Questions
Which providers here offer it?
5 of the 42 providers Proxy Compare tracks, read 5 Oct 2026. It is a scraping-API feature rather than a proxy one, which is why the count is small: a proxy forwards your request, it does not run the page.
When do I actually need it?
When the content you want is written into the page by script after it loads. If the data is already in the raw HTML you are paying for a browser you did not need, and the cheapest test is to fetch the page and look.
What does it cost me?
More bandwidth and more credits per request, because a real browser fetches every asset the page asks for rather than the one document you wanted. It is normally sold as a separate and dearer tier.