Credit (scraping API)
A credit is nominally one request against a scraping API. Proxy Compare tracks 7 scraping APIs alongside 35 proxy sellers, read 5 Oct 2026. What a page actually costs varies with JavaScript rendering, geotargeting and retries, so the headline credit price is rarely the price of a page.
Why it costs you money
A credit price cannot be compared between providers without knowing what a credit buys, and it changes within one provider by request type. ZenRows draws 5 credits for JavaScript rendering, 10 for premium proxies, 25 for both, and a flat 25,000 per gigabyte of residential bandwidth, all from one balance. ScraperAPI charges 1 credit for a standard page. Of the ten scraping APIs we track, seven bill in credits and only two quote a price per gigabyte at all, so the per-GB figure this site compares proxies on does not reach them.
See it in the data
Related terms
- Per-GB pricingBilling by the gigabyte you move, the dominant model for residential proxies and the one most comparisons assume.
- Success-only billingCompare successful-request billing policies, including chargeable errors, early cancellations and failed-request protection.
- JavaScript renderingRunning a page's own scripts in a browser before returning it. Scraping APIs charge more for it, sometimes five times a plain fetch.
- Concurrency limitThe cap on how many requests you can have in flight at once. Often the real constraint on a scraping job, not price.
- Every term we define
Questions
Is one credit one page?
Nominally yes, and often not. What a page costs varies with JavaScript rendering, geotargeting and retries, so the headline credit price is seldom what a page actually costs you.
How do I compare credits with gigabytes?
Convert one into the other using your own average page weight. That conversion is what the cost calculators on this site do, and without it a per-request price and a per-gigabyte price cannot be compared at all.
Which providers bill only for successful requests?
1 of the 42 providers state that they do, read 5 Oct 2026. On a hard target that difference is most of the bill, and it is worth more than a lower headline rate.