Scraping Fish Review 2026: Pricing, Pros, Cons & What Other Sites Get Wrong
Software Advice, G2, and SoftwareWorld all list CAPTCHA solving as a Scraping Fish feature. The vendor explicitly says it doesn't offer that. Most "reviews" of Scraping Fish are auto-generated directory pages recycling bad data, and we got tired of seeing the same wrong information repeated everywhere. So we dug into the actual pricing math, verified every limitation against the vendor's own documentation, and compared real per-request costs across five competitors.
What Is Scraping Fish?
Scraping Fish is a web scraping API built by Narf AI. You send a URL, it returns HTML. The infrastructure handles real browsers, rotating mobile (4G/LTE) proxies, and JavaScript rendering - all at a flat $0.002 per successful request. No credit multipliers, no feature tiers. Failed requests aren't charged.
Quick Verdict
Best for: High-volume scraping of non-protected, JS-heavy pages where you need predictable costs.
Not for: Geo-locked content requiring US or APAC IPs (proxies are Poland-only), or sites behind Cloudflare, DataDome, or CAPTCHA challenges.
Skip scraping entirely if you're building B2B prospect lists. Scraping company websites for contact info is a slow, brittle pipeline. Tools like Prospeo give you verified emails and direct dials from 300M+ profiles, starting free - no parsing HTML, no maintaining scrapers. (If that’s your use case, see our guide to web scraping lead generation and why it often breaks at scale.)
Scraping Fish Pricing Breakdown
Every successful request costs $0.002 - JS rendering, mobile proxies, all included. VAT may apply depending on your location.
| Pack | Price | Requests | Expiration |
|---|---|---|---|
| Starter | $2 | 1,000 | 1 month |
| Growth | $20 | 10,250 | 3 months |
| Pro | $200 | 105,000 | 6 months |
For steady workloads, unlimited plans run $100/mo (1 concurrent connection) up to $2,000/mo (20 concurrent). Auto-renewing packs sit between pay-as-you-go and unlimited, and you can cancel anytime.
The real "entry price" is the $2 Starter pack. Here's the thing, though: that pack disappears in 30 days, which punishes experimentation. If you're just kicking the tires, you'll want the Growth pack's 3-month window instead - it's more forgiving, but still something to plan around.
Scraping Fish costs $0.002/request - but you still need to parse HTML, clean data, and verify contacts yourself. Prospeo gives you 98% accurate emails and 125M+ verified mobiles from 300M+ profiles at ~$0.01/email. No scrapers to maintain, no selectors to fix.
Replace your entire scrape-parse-verify pipeline with one search.
How Pricing Compares to Competitors
Most comparison pages compare advertised credit prices, not what you actually pay per request. Credit multipliers at ScrapingBee and ZenRows change the math dramatically once you enable JS rendering or premium proxies. We ran the numbers so you don't have to. (If you’re evaluating alternatives, our ScrapingBee alternatives breakdown goes deeper on real cost math.)
| Provider | Plan | Effective $/Request |
|---|---|---|
| Scraping Fish | Pay-as-you-go | $0.002 |
| ZenRows | Developer $69.99/mo (25x multiplier) | $0.007 (JS+premium) |
| ScrapFly | Standard tier | ~$0.019 |
| ScrapingBee | Freelance $49/mo | $0.015 (stealth) |
| ScraperAPI | Hobby ~$49/mo | ~$0.037 |
Let's break down ScrapingBee as an example. The Freelance plan advertises 250,000 credits for $49/mo. Sounds generous. But stealth proxy mode costs 75 credits per request - that's roughly 3,333 actual requests, making your true cost $0.015 each. On r/webscraping, users regularly complain about frequent failures with ScraperAPI and ScrapingBee on tougher sites, and Scraping Fish comes up as a candidate worth testing.
Scraping Fish's 1-request-equals-1-request model eliminates this math entirely. At 100K requests/month, you'd pay $200 with Scraping Fish versus about $1,470 at ScrapingBee stealth rates. That's a 7x difference.
Pros and Cons From Real Users
Pros
- Flat $0.002/request with zero credit multipliers - what you see is what you pay
- Dead-simple integration. A G2 reviewer (CTO) called it "easy scraping via URL"
- JS rendering included at no extra cost, which competitors charge 5-75x for
- Failed requests aren't charged - you only pay for successful responses
- Responsive support. Software Advice rates it 5.0/5 across 6 reviews
Cons
- Proxies originate from Poland only. No US, APAC, or other geo options. If you need location-specific content, this is a dealbreaker.
- No anti-bot bypass or CAPTCHA solving. The vendor is upfront about this - don't trust directory sites that say otherwise.
- Credit expiration on smaller packs. The 1-month Starter window punishes experimentation.
- Dashboard is bare-bones. Multiple reviewers want more UI features.
Who Should (and Shouldn't) Use It
Use Scraping Fish if you run high-volume scraping of non-protected sites, need JS rendering without multiplier surcharges, and value simplicity over feature depth. If you’re doing this for sales ops, it’s worth mapping the downstream steps (enrichment, verification, CRM sync) before you commit - see our overview of data enrichment services.
Skip it if you need US or APAC geo IPs, target Cloudflare/DataDome/CAPTCHA-protected sites, or run sporadic low-volume jobs where credit expiration eats your budget. Scraping Fish also wasn't included in the Proxyway 2026 Web Scraping API Report, so there's no independent benchmark data to reference.
Our take: Scraping Fish is the cheapest scraping API on the market for straightforward, high-volume jobs. But "cheapest" only matters if it can actually reach your target sites. If you're hitting anything with serious bot protection, the $0.002 price tag is irrelevant because you'll get blocked. We'd pick ZenRows or ScrapFly for protected sites and Scraping Fish for everything else.
When Scraping Isn't the Right Tool
Look - if you're scraping websites to extract B2B contact data, you're solving the wrong problem. Scraping gives you HTML. Then you need to parse it, clean it, verify it, and maintain the whole pipeline when sites change their markup. We've watched teams burn weeks on this. If you’re still tempted, compare approaches in our guide on how to scrape email addresses from websites free (and the tradeoffs).
Prospeo replaces that entire workflow with verified contacts from 300M+ profiles - 98% email accuracy and 125M+ verified mobile numbers, refreshed every 7 days. At roughly $0.01 per email with a free tier of 75 emails/month, it's faster and more reliable than any scrape-parse-verify chain you'll build yourself. For a broader view of what to use instead, see our list of free lead generation tools and our breakdown of best sales prospecting databases.
You're comparing scraping APIs to save fractions of a cent per request. Meanwhile, teams using Prospeo skip scraping entirely and book 35% more meetings than Apollo users - with data refreshed every 7 days, not scraped from stale HTML.
Stop optimizing your scraping costs. Eliminate them.