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Before committing to a 10,000-page scrape, you want a credible estimate of how many credits it’ll consume. This guide shows you how to produce one.

The simple formula

Credits per page:
  • standard: 1
  • premium: 3
Cache hits are 0 regardless of mode, so if you’ve scraped a URL recently and it’s still within the 24h TTL, that specific page is free.

Estimating for standard

Trivial. If you know the page count, you know the cost.
standard is the default. Reader will return an error on a blocked page rather than silently charging more.

Estimating for premium

Also trivial, just 3x:
Use premium only when you know the target site needs it. See Choosing a proxy mode.

Estimating for a mixed batch

If you have a mix of standard and premium URLs, calculate each group separately:
Common cost profiles by site type:

Pilot first

For any batch above a few hundred URLs against unfamiliar sites, run a pilot on a representative subset of 50-100 URLs with standard mode first. Check success rates and markdown quality:
Now you have a real number grounded in the actual site you’re targeting.

Crawl cost

Crawls charge crawlPerPage (flat 1 credit per page discovered) plus the scrape cost per page:
Crawls are single-credit-per-page because they run in a mode optimized for link discovery. The trick with crawls is that pages discovered is hard to predict without running the crawl; set maxPages as a hard cap so worst-case spend is bounded.

Reading the bill afterwards

After the run, /v1/usage/history shows per-request cost broken down by proxyMode. The sum of the credits column is your actual spend.

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