Estimating web scraping costs requires understanding three variables: request volume (how many URLs you'll scrape), frequency (how often you'll run the scraper), and anti-bot tier usage (which tier each site requires — standard HTTP vs. full browser rendering).
AlterLab's pay-as-you-go pricing scales with request complexity. Standard HTTP requests (Tier 1) handle most sites and cost the least. JavaScript-rendered requests (Tier 2) cost more due to browser execution. Higher tiers for bot-protected sites cost proportionally more.
A typical price monitoring project scraping 10,000 product pages daily from standard e-commerce sites falls primarily in Tier 1–2. An AI training data collection project requiring full browser rendering across JavaScript-heavy news sites would trend toward Tier 2–3. Use this calculator to estimate your specific workload.