The best Bright Data alternatives give you the same building blocks (proxies, unblocking, ready-made scrapers) without monthly commitments in the hundreds of dollars. Scrape.ly is our top pick: residential proxy traffic from $4 down to $2 per GB, 568 ready-made scrapers priced per result, and a maximum charge on every run.
Bright Data sells each product separately: proxies per GB, its Web Scraper API per 1,000 records, and monthly plans that start at $499. That suits large contracts, but it's a lot of structure for a team that wants data next week. This list compares five alternatives on what they charge per GB and per result, what they ask you to commit, and what they're best at. Prices were checked on 22 October 2026.
Why teams look for Bright Data alternatives
Bright Data pricing is published per product, and its pages explain the mechanics plainly:
- Lower rates need a monthly commitment. Residential traffic costs $4 per GB pay as you go (shown discounted from $8). Plans at $499 a month keep it at $4 per GB; it drops to $3 per GB only on the $999 and $1,999 plans, per Bright Data's residential pricing page.
- Unused commitment doesn't roll over. The same page's FAQ says the monthly commitment "will not roll over to the next month, regardless of whether your usage charges fell below the minimum commitment."
- Running out suspends the account. At 100% of your balance, "your account will be suspended unless additional funds are added." Bright Data recommends auto-recharge.
- Scrapers are a separate product. The Web Scraper API costs $1.50 per 1,000 records pay as you go, or $499 a month for 384,000 records on its Scale plan.
What to look for in a Bright Data alternative
- A low per-GB rate without a big commitment. The price you pay at 100 GB matters more than the price at 10 TB.
- Ready-made scrapers that return structured data. You want product fields, not raw pages to parse.
- One balance for everything. Proxies, scrapers and browsers on one bill.
- A hard spending cap. A limit per job that stops it, rather than an alert after the fact.
- Anti-bot tools and an agent path. A hosted browser for hard sites and an MCP server for AI agents.
Bright Data alternatives compared
| Tool | How you pay | Residential proxy per GB | Paid plans from | Free to start | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Scrape.ly | One prepaid balance: per-result Actors, proxy per GB, browser per hour | $4 (Free), $3.50 (Starter), $2.75 (Scale), $2 (Business) | Starter $19 a month, all of it usable credit | $5 of credit every month, no card | Structured data from 568 ready-made scrapers, with proxies and an anti-bot browser built in |
| Bright Data | Per product: per GB, per 1,000 records; pay as you go or monthly commitments | $4 pay as you go and on $499 plans; $3 on $999 and $1,999 plans | Pay as you go; plans from $499 a month | Free tiers on some products | Enterprise contracts across many proxy types |
| Oxylabs | Monthly subscription with volume tiers per product | $6 (Starter) down to $2.50 (Enterprise, 1,000+ GB) | Starter $30 a month | $5 welcome credits | Teams that want a large proxy vendor on a subscription |
| Zyte | Per 1,000 responses, by site difficulty tier | Included in the response price | Pay as you go; commitments from $100 a month | $5 credit for 30 days | Scrapy teams |
| ScraperAPI | Monthly API credits, 1 to 30+ per request by domain | Included in credits | Hobby $49 a month | 7-day trial with 5,000 credits | One-URL-at-a-time fetching |
| Apify | Prepaid usage plus each Actor's price | $8 (Free, Starter), $7.50 (Scale), $7 (Business) | Starter $19 a month | $5 of usage a month | Teams already building on Apify |
Every competitor price is from that vendor's pricing page on 22 October 2026.
1. Scrape.ly: proxies, scrapers and a browser on one balance
Scrape.ly is a web data platform: a Store of 568 ready-made scrapers called Actors, a cloud runtime that runs them, proxies built into every run, a hosted anti-bot browser, an API and an MCP server for AI agents. Everything draws from one prepaid USD balance.
Residential traffic for $2 to $4 per GB. The rate falls with your plan: $4 on Free, $3.50 on Starter ($19 a month), $2.75 on Scale ($199) and $2 on Business ($999). Datacenter traffic costs $1 per GB, down to $0.75 on Business. Each plan's price comes back as the same amount of usable credit, so the plan fee isn't a separate cost on top of your traffic. Proxies work inside every Scrape.ly run with no proxy account to set up: each run gets its own credentials.
Two worked examples against Bright Data's published rates:
| Monthly residential traffic | Scrape.ly | Bright Data |
|---|---|---|
| 100 GB | Scale plan: 100 × $2.75 = $275 | Pay as you go: 100 × $4 = $400 |
| 500 GB | Business plan: 500 × $2 = $1,000 | $999 plan at $3 per GB: 500 × $3 = $1,500 |
At 100 GB, the Scale plan's $199 of credit covers most of it and you add $76 of credit; at 500 GB, Business covers $999 of it. Scrape.ly saves $125 a month at 100 GB and $500 a month at 500 GB.
Structured data, priced per result. Most teams buy proxies to scrape a handful of big sites. The Store already has an Actor for most of them, each with a listed price per result: the Amazon Product Scraper charges $0.70 per 1,000 products, against $1.50 per 1,000 records on Bright Data's Web Scraper API pay as you go. Our real run on 22 October 2026, the Keyboards from a search URL preset, saved 5 products in 6.1 seconds for $0.0046 in total: $0.0035 in result fees, $0.0008 of compute, $0.0002 of datacenter proxy traffic and $0.00006 of storage writes.
| title | price.value | stars | reviewsCount |
|---|---|---|---|
| Logitech MK270 Full Size Wireless Keyboard and Mouse Combo - Black | 19.99 | 4.5 | 111,300 |
| Amazon Basics Wired QWERTY Keyboard, Works with Windows, Plug and Pla… | 11.15 | 4.5 | 10,000 |
| Redragon K521 Upgrade Rainbow LED Gaming Keyboard, 104 Keys Wired Mec… | 15.99 | 4.3 | 11,400 |
Those are typed fields, ready for a spreadsheet or a database. The Amazon scraping tutorial lists every field.
An anti-bot browser for the hard sites. For your own scrapers, the Scrape.ly browser is a hosted Chromium with anti-bot fingerprints, Cloudflare Turnstile solving and its own residential proxy, at a list price of $0.45 per browser hour. Turn it on for an Actor and your Playwright or Puppeteer code connects to it without changes. See anti-blocking.
Costs you can cap. Set a maximum charge when you start a run, and the run stops when it reaches it, proxy traffic and browser time included. No surprise bills.
For developers and agents. JavaScript and Python SDKs built on Crawlee keep the Apify SDK API, the API clients are drop-in replacements for apify-client, and the hosted MCP server at https://api.scrape.ly/mcp lets Claude, Cursor or ChatGPT search the Store and run Actors for you.
See the full Scrape.ly vs Bright Data comparison.
2. Oxylabs
Oxylabs sells proxies and scraping APIs under one subscription: Starter at $30 a month, Basic at $100, Flexible at $500, and Enterprise from $2,500, per its pricing page. Residential traffic costs $6 per GB on Starter, $5 on Basic, $4 on Flexible and $2.50 on Enterprise volumes above 1,000 GB. New accounts get $5 of welcome credits.
Best for: teams that want a second large proxy vendor on a monthly subscription. If you're looking for an Oxylabs alternative too, the same math applies: Scrape.ly's Scale plan ($199) already charges $2.75 per GB, against $4 on Oxylabs' $500 plan, and Business ($999) charges $2, below Oxylabs' Enterprise rate. See Scrape.ly vs Oxylabs.
3. Zyte
Zyte sells Zyte API, priced per 1,000 responses by site difficulty, and hosts Scrapy spiders on Scrapy Cloud. Pay as you go runs from $0.13 to $1.27 per 1,000 HTTP responses and from $1.01 to $16.08 per 1,000 browser-rendered responses across its five tiers. Monthly commitments of $100, $200 and $500 lower those rates, and new accounts get $5 of credit for 30 days, per Zyte's pricing page.
Best for: Scrapy teams who want unblocking per response. Your per-page price depends on the tier Zyte assigns to each site, so check your targets in its calculator first.
4. ScraperAPI
ScraperAPI is a per-request scraping API billed in monthly credits: Hobby at $49 for 100,000 credits, Startup at $149 for 1,000,000 and Business at $299 for 3,000,000. A standard page costs 1 credit, Amazon 5, Google and Bing 25 and LinkedIn 30, and bot-protected sites add 10, per ScraperAPI's pricing page. A 7-day trial includes 5,000 credits.
Best for: developers who fetch one URL at a time and parse the response themselves. On protected or high-cost domains, the credit multipliers decide your real price per page.
5. Apify
Apify runs Actors from its own Store, the model Scrape.ly also uses. Plans start at $19 a month (Starter), with $199 Scale and $999 Business plans, and its Free plan includes $5 of usage a month. Residential proxy traffic costs $8 per GB on Free and Starter, $7.50 on Scale and $7 on Business, per Apify's pricing page.
Best for: teams already invested in Apify. Scrape.ly's residential traffic costs half as much on the entry plans ($4 vs $8 per GB) and less than a third on Business ($2 vs $7), and most Apify Actors run on Scrape.ly unchanged.
How to switch from Bright Data to Scrape.ly
- Map each Bright Data product to its job. Proxy traffic for your own scraper, Web Scraper API calls for a site, browser sessions for hard pages.
- Replace Web Scraper API calls with Store Actors. Search the Store for the site, run a preset on the free credit, and compare the fields.
- Move your own scrapers into Actors. Wrap your code with the JavaScript or Python SDK and deploy it with the CLI. The SDK picks up the managed proxy, so you drop your proxy credentials.
- Turn on the Scrape.ly browser for Playwright or Puppeteer scrapers that hit Cloudflare Turnstile.
- Cap every run. Set a maximum charge per run, and add a low-balance alert.
From code, a Store Actor is one call. This runs the same Amazon search as our real run and returns the products as JSON (it finished in 6 seconds, well inside the synchronous endpoint's 45-second wait):
curl -X POST "https://api.scrape.ly/v2/actors/shelfbright~amazon-product-scraper/run-sync-get-dataset-items" \
-H "Authorization: Bearer $SCRAPELY_TOKEN" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"categoryOrProductUrls": [{"url": "https://www.amazon.com/s?k=keyboard"}], "maxItemsPerStartUrl": 5, "maxSearchPagesPerStartUrl": 1, "scrapeProductDetails": false}'An AI agent can do the same over MCP: add https://api.scrape.ly/mcp to your client and ask, "Use scrapely to run shelfbright/amazon-product-scraper on the Amazon search for keyboard, 5 products, and give me title, price and rating."
FAQ
What is the best Bright Data alternative?
Scrape.ly. It puts residential proxies ($4 down to $2 per GB), 568 ready-made scrapers priced per result and a hosted anti-bot browser on one prepaid balance, with a maximum charge on every run and an MCP server for AI agents.
How much does Bright Data cost?
On 22 October 2026, Bright Data's residential proxies cost $4 per GB pay as you go, $4 per GB on $499 monthly plans and $3 per GB on its $999 and $1,999 plans. Its Web Scraper API costs $1.50 per 1,000 records pay as you go, or $499 a month for 384,000 records.
Is there a cheaper alternative to Bright Data for residential proxies?
Yes. Scrape.ly charges $3.50 per GB on its $19 Starter plan, $2.75 on Scale and $2 on Business, so 100 GB a month costs $275 on Scale against $400 on Bright Data's pay-as-you-go rate.
Does Bright Data require a monthly commitment?
Not for pay as you go. The lower $3 per GB residential rate comes with plans of $999 a month and up, and a monthly commitment that doesn't roll over.
Can I scrape without managing proxies at all?
Yes. Scrape.ly's Store Actors handle proxies, retries and parsing for you and charge per result, such as $0.70 per 1,000 Amazon products, plus a little platform usage. You get structured fields instead of raw pages.
