Scrapeless is a Google Search API built as a direct SearchApi.io alternative. SearchApi's published plans run from $4.00 per 1,000 on the entry tier down to $1.00 only once you are buying five million searches a month. Scrapeless lists $1 per 1,000 successful requests from the first search, and goes below $0.50 on volume tiers.
Same structured JSON. Sub-second responses, no 20%-per-hour usage cap, and you are billed for results rather than a prepaid monthly bucket.
Cost per 1,000 searches, at list price
Each SearchApi plan against the Scrapeless base rate. Lower is better.
vs SearchApi Developer
10,000 / movs SearchApi Production
35,000 / movs SearchApi BigData
100,000 / movs SearchApi Scale
250,000 / moBased on SearchApi’s published plans (Oct 2026). Scrapeless starts at $1/1,000 successful requests, with volume discounts. Check current pricing before purchase.
SearchApi sells a fixed monthly bucket of searches and discounts it as the bucket grows. Scrapeless bills per successful request from the first one. Lining the two up at SearchApi's own plan volumes shows where the gap sits — widest at the entry tiers, where most teams actually start.
| Monthly volume | Scrapeless at $1/1K | SearchApi plan | SearchApi cost | SearchApi per 1K | Difference |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 | $10 | Developer | $40 | $4.00 | 4×less |
| 35,000 | $35 | Production | $100 | $2.86 | 2.9×less |
| 100,000 | $100 | BigData | $250 | $2.50 | 2.5×less |
| 250,000 | $250 | Scale | $500 | $2.00 | 2×less |
| 1,000,000 | Volume tier | Octo 1M | $1,500 | $1.50 | talk to sales |
| 5,000,000 | Volume tier | Octo 5M | $5,000 | $1.00 | talk to sales |
SearchApi plan prices and included volumes as published on searchapi.io, October 2026; cost per 1,000 is those two figures divided. Note that SearchApi's own page lists the Production plan at $3.00 per 1,000 while $100 for 35,000 searches computes to $2.86 — we have used the computed figure. Scrapeless lists $1 per 1,000 successful requests, dropping below $0.50 per 1,000 on qualifying volume plans, which is why the million-plus rows point to sales rather than quoting a rate we would have to caveat. Requests that return shopping data are billed at twice the base rate. Both vendors change pricing; confirm current rates before you commit.
Run the numbers on your own volume. The free trial takes a minute to start and needs no card.
Price gets a team to look. What keeps them is that the hourly usage cap disappears and unused searches stop evaporating at the end of the month.
SearchApi's cheapest per-search rate is reserved for its largest plans — you reach $1.00 per 1,000 at five million searches a month. Scrapeless charges $1 per 1,000 on the very first request, so a team running 10,000 searches a month pays the rate a team running five million pays there.
SearchApi caps usage at 20% of your plan's credits in any one hour. On the Developer plan that is 2,000 searches an hour, so a 10,000-keyword sweep takes five hours of wall clock no matter how much concurrency you have. Scrapeless meters concurrency instead, with no hourly cap to schedule around.
A monthly bucket makes you guess your volume a month ahead and pay for the guess. Scrapeless counts successful requests as they happen — a quiet month costs less, a busy one does not need a mid-cycle upgrade, and a request that fails is retried at our cost rather than drawn from your allowance.
Vendor claims are easy to write. These are figures from our own runs — dates, sample sizes and the caveats included, so you can judge them rather than take them. Every number below is reproducible on both free tiers.
Scrapeless posted the lowest average, p50 and p95 of all seven APIs in this run (p50 1.981s). SearchApi also returned 10 of 10 usable requests, so this is a speed difference rather than a reliability one. These were long-sentence queries, which are harder than typical short keywords — the published sub-second figure refers to standard queries, and this run is the harder end of the range.
800 web-search requests each, US English · Scrapeless vs Oxylabs
Disclosed in full: Oxylabs returned an internal status 613 on 82 of its 800 requests in this run. That anomaly is part of why the gap is this wide, and we show it rather than leaving it out. This is one configuration on one day — it does not establish that Scrapeless is more reliable across every market, account and setup.
Requests with usable organic results, of 800
Usable-request latency — P50
Usable-request latency — P95
Beyond response speed, we measure the depth and completeness of search results — from organic result coverage and raw HTML retrieval to snippet field availability.
92 / 0
Walking start=0..90 returned 92 organic result items across ten consecutive pages with no empty page. Same run: SerpApi 88, SearchAPI.io 87.
99.5%
In the volume run, 99.5% of returned organic result items carried a snippet field. This is field coverage, not snippet accuracy.
1,818 KB
Fetching metadata.rawUrl as a second request returned roughly 1,818 KB of original HTML, and the document-structure check passed.
Understand how the benchmarks were conducted, what the metrics mean, and the limitations behind the results.
seven SERP APIs against the same 10 US-English long-sentence queries, 10 usable requests each. A ten-query sample is small — treat it as indicative, not definitive.
800 web-search requests per vendor, US English. Figures are for usable requests only.
These are our own tests on our own accounts. Both free tiers are open, so the honest check is your keyword list, your markets, timed on your side.
The 92 figure counts organic result items, not 92 unique destination websites.
Raw HTML needs a second call to metadata.rawUrl. It is not returned inline with the first response.
99.5% is field coverage — the share of result items carrying a snippet — not a measure of whether the snippet text is correct.
A single num=100 request returned HTTP 400 in the same testing; the ten-page walk above is the method that worked.
Seven countries returned organic results, but some responses did not confirm region or language — that is coverage, not geo-targeting accuracy.
Both free tiers are open — run your keyword list through each and time it yourself.
Set the comparison aside for a moment. This is what the Scrapeless Google Search API gives you as a product — the reasons teams stay after the migration, not just the reason they arrive.
A flat, published base rate that drops below $0.50 per 1,000 on volume tiers — with no prepaid pack to buy and no credits that expire before you use them.
Typical response time is under 1 second, which is what makes a daily — or hourly — tracking cadence practical rather than something you batch overnight and read tomorrow.
Billing counts successful requests only. A request that fails is retried at our cost and never reaches your invoice, so your effective cost per usable row is the number you were quoted.
Shape any request by country, language, location and device with gl, hl, google_domain and a proxy country — the same call, pointed at whichever market you need.
Organic results, knowledge graph, local pack and map, latest posts, pagination and search metadata arrive as typed JSON — and AI Overview comes back as Markdown you can hand straight to a model.
Concurrency-based metering with dedicated concurrency on volume plans, a free trial with no credit card, and a named solutions engineer once you are running production workloads.
Where the two services genuinely differ, and where they do the same job. Everything in the SearchApi column comes from its own public pricing and documentation pages.
| Feature | Scrapeless Google Search API | SearchApi |
|---|---|---|
| List price per 1,000 | $1.00 from the first search, under $0.50 on volume tiers | $4.00 entry, falling to $1.00 at 5M searches/month |
| Billing model | Per successful request — failures retried at our cost | Prepaid monthly bucket of searches |
| Hourly usage cap | None Concurrency-based metering | 20% Of plan credits per hour |
| Free allowance | Yes Free trial, no credit card required | Yes 100 requests |
| Published response timeStandard queries, vendor stated | Under 1 second | Not stated numerically — plans are labelled "standard" or "enhanced" speed |
| Measured response timeour long-sentence benchmark | 2.168s average, p50 1.981s, p95 3.190s — lowest of the seven APIs tested | 3.306s average, p95 4.600s — 10/10 usable |
| Measured result depthten-page walk, start=0..90 | 92 organic result items, zero empty pages | 87 organic result items |
| Published SLA | Available on enterprise agreements — ask during onboarding | 99.9% On every paid plan from Developer up |
| Organic results | Yes position, title, link, redirect_link, favicon, snippet, snippet_highlighted_words, source | Yes Structured JSON |
| Knowledge graph, local pack, pagination | Yes knowledge_graph, local_results, local_map, pagination | Yes |
| Google AI Overview | Yes Dedicated scraper.overview actor returning Markdown, source[], products[] | Yes Dedicated AI Overview API |
| Geo & language targeting | Yes gl, hl, google_domain, proxy country | Yes |
| Breadth of non-Google engines | Focused Deep on Google surfaces; other sources via Web Unlocker and Agent Browser | Broad Many search engines beyond Google |
SearchApi column compiled from its public pricing and documentation pages, October 2026. Vendors update their products; re-check anything that will drive a purchase decision.
Four steps from signing up to a scheduled production job. No SDK is required — the API is one HTTP endpoint, so curl is enough to see your first result.
Sign up with no credit card and you land in the dashboard with a usable key. The free trial is there so you can run your real keyword list before deciding anything. Try for Free →
Find it under API Key in the dashboard. Every request carries it as an x-api-token header — there is no OAuth dance and no key in the query string. API reference →
POST to /api/v1/scraper/request with the actor scraper.google.search and your query in input. A 200 hands back the parsed JSON directly; a 201 returns a taskId to poll for longer jobs. Quickstart →
Vary gl, hl and google_domain to cover each market, page with start and num, and call scraper.overview when you also need the AI Overview answer. Then put it on a cron and watch the cost per run. Product page →
# 1 — organic results for one market
curl 'https://api.scrapeless.com/api/v1/scraper/request' \
--header 'x-api-token: YOUR_KEY' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data '{
"actor": "scraper.google.search",
"input": {
"q": "best running shoes",
"hl": "en",
"gl": "us",
"google_domain": "google.com",
"start": 0,
"num": 20
}
}'
# → organic_results[], knowledge_graph,
# local_results, pagination, search_information
# 2 — the AI Overview answer, same key
curl 'https://api.scrapeless.com/api/v2/scraper/execute' \
--header 'x-api-token: YOUR_KEY' \
--header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
--data '{
"actor": "scraper.overview",
"input": { "prompt": "best running shoes",
"country": "us" }
}'
# → content (Markdown), source[], products[]Full parameter list, response schemas, language examples and the pricing calculator.
Both services take a query and hand back structured JSON, so a migration is a request rewrite and a field remap — not a re-architecture. Here is the same search on each side.
What changes in your code: the HTTP method becomes POST, api_key in the query string becomes an x-api-token header, and your search parameters move inside an input object under "actor": "scraper.google.search".
What does not change: q, hl, gl, google_domain, start and num keep their names and meanings, and the response is still a JSON object keyed by result type — so most parsers need a rename, not a rewrite. A 200 carries the data directly; a 201 returns a taskId to poll.
Get a key, point one job at the new endpoint, and keep the old one running alongside it.
One published rate that falls with volume. No prepaid pack, no seat fees, no per-engine surcharge — and you are billed only for requests that actually return data.
Run your own keyword list through the real API before you decide anything.
The published base rate, charged per successful request rather than a monthly bucket you have to forecast.
Rates drop below half the base price on qualifying volume plans, with capacity and support to match.
Not sure which tier you land in? Start on the free trial, run a week of your real workload, and we will quote from the usage rather than a guess.
· In every plan ·
Requests that return shopping data are billed at twice the base rate. Volume pricing depends on committed monthly volume — see the pricing page for current tiers, or for a quote against your actual query mix.
Pick the workload closest to yours and see the fields, the request shape and the cadence it implies.
Daily positions across keywords, domains and markets.
Local results and map placement per city, at the granularity multi-location brands need.
Whether your brand appears in the AI answer, and which sources it cites.
Shopping surfaces, competitor listings and demand signals from the SERP.
Verify PPC and Ads visibility, placement and competitive messaging across target queries and markets.
The complete scenario library.
Start free without a credit card, point your existing job at one endpoint, and check the response against what you are paying for today.