Head to head · Extraction · October 2026 research run

ScraperAPI vs SoldFetch

SoldFetch scores 58 (C) on agent readiness against ScraperAPI's 52.1 (D), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. ScraperAPI leads on maintenance & community and transparency & trust. Both do extraction.

Best web scraping and crawling APIs for AI agents · All 304 scrapers comparisons

Which one, for what

ScraperAPI D

Best for Agents that want a single GET to fetch pages through proxies, with parsed JSON for Amazon, Google, Walmart, eBay and Redfin and a batch API of up to 50,000 URLs.

Ahead on

  • Maintenance & community, 61 against 49
  • Transparency & trust, 54 against 41

Also in its favour

  • Runs on your own machine

Watch for

No status page is linked from the home, pricing, support or docs pages, although the pricing page lists a 99.9% uptime guarantee

SoldFetch C

Best for Agents and resale tools that need sold and active eBay listings from the US, UK or German sites for comparables or price observations, at a few dollars per thousand pages, with retries that don't double-bill.

Ahead on

  • Reliability, 55 against 45
  • Security & auth, 62 against 29

Watch for

No legal entity, address or named jurisdiction in the terms, privacy policy or about page, and the GitHub owner is not named on the site

Why the edge

Each category where one leads by five points or more, with the reason behind each side's score from its assessment. The numbers are in the table below; this is what they stand for.

Security & auth SoldFetch +33

ScraperAPI 29

One API key per account, regenerated from the dashboard at most once every 24 hours. No scopes (20). The documented default puts the key in the URL query string, so less 10, although an x-sapi-api_key header and a Bearer header on the remote MCP server exist (10 of 30). No read-only or restricted keys. max_cost, a monthly pay-as-you-go spending cap and destructive hints on the two MCP delete tools limit damage (6 of 20). The API returns untrusted web content and no prompt-injection guidance was found in the docs, the MCP README or the skills (2 of 15). The dashboard has analytics with error logs, each response carries sa-credit-cost, and the privacy policy says activity logs are deleted after 7 days (9 of 15). /.well-known/security.txt returned 404, and no disclosure policy, bug bounty or certification was found. The home page claims CCPA and GDPR compliance (2 of 20).

SoldFetch 62

Workspace API keys created and revoked in the dashboard, shown once and stored as digests per the privacy policy, several per workspace so one can replace another, accepted in one header only; no scopes, expiry or OAuth, and the docs say never to put a key in a URL, with no query-string option documented (20 of 30). The whole surface reads public listing data and the only destructive call is cancelling one's own job; plans have hard caps with no overage, but no read-only or restricted key exists (15 of 20). Every response carries third-party listing text. The AI agents guide, the MCP README, SECURITY.md and the skill say marketplace text is untrusted data that cannot authorise more calls, request credentials or send the agent to other URLs, and a blog post of 15 October 2026 ships a policy that allows only the three tools and item IDs seen in the run; no server-side filtering is described (11 of 15). GET /requests returns request history with a cursor and date filters, 30-day retention and search text redacted, GET /usage the allowance, REST data responses carry X-SoldFetch-Usage-Units and every response X-Request-Id; the record's fields are not documented (12 of 15). No security.txt (client error), bug bounty, SOC 2 or ISO 27001; the repositories' SECURITY.md files give a reporting route to contact@soldfetch.com (4 of 20). 20+15+11+12+4 = 62.

Transparency & trust ScraperAPI +13

ScraperAPI 54

Closed service. The MCP server and skills are MIT. Terms of Use exist at /terms/, but robots.txt disallows that path, so we could not confirm what they say (10 of 30). The privacy policy says activity logs are deleted after 7 days and account data within 60 days of a request, async results are kept up to 72 hours and DataPipeline results 30 days. The policy is undated, names Saas.group Inc. while a November 2025 release note says the service operates as ScraperAPI LLC, and no DPA was found (14 of 30). The terms and billing change was announced with effective dates of 4 November 2025 and 5 January 2026. No standing deprecation policy (8 of 20). No sub-processor list or hosting location found, only a general statement on transfers outside the EEA (3 of 20).

SoldFetch 41

Closed hosted service. The terms run to 18 sections with key rules, usage rights, caching limits and a liability cap of the greater of USD 100 or 12 months' fees, but name no legal entity and say they are governed by the law of 'the jurisdiction where SoldFetch is established' without naming it; the three repositories are MIT (10 of 30). The privacy policy (updated 22 October 2026) gives request-log retention of 7, 30 or 90 days by plan, about an hour for exports, digests for keys and cookie durations, and the docs give cache periods and 24 hours for job results; the pricing page's 30-day request logs on every plan disagrees with the policy's plan-based periods, backups have no period and no DPA was found (20 of 30). No deprecation policy or dated notices; terms 11.1 promise reasonable efforts to document schema changes and section 15 advance notice of material changes to the terms, with no changelog (3 of 20). Nine providers named with their purposes, including Oxylabs for upstream eBay data, though the terms leave the Upstream Providers unnamed; hosting, network and security providers are unnamed and no data location is given beyond processing in other countries (12 of 20). 10+20+3+12 = 45.

Maintenance & community ScraperAPI +12

ScraperAPI 61

The skills plugin was last updated on 7 August 2026, 63 days before the check, and the MCP server's v1.1.1 is from 17 July 2026 (20 of 30). MCP v1.1.0 and v1.1.1 on 17 July and the plugin update on 7 August fall within 90 days, with two July 2026 release notes dated by month only (20). Monthly release notes and support through the dashboard and email. We did not read the repository's issues (8 of 15). SDKs are documented for five languages, but we did not check their release dates, and the MCP server's registry entry was not checked (8 of 15). The MCP repository has unit tests and a lock file with current dependencies but no public CI workflow (5 of 10).

SoldFetch 49

Closed service. The latest dated changes are commits to all three public repositories and four blog posts on 27 October 2026, and the docs sitemap dates the authentication page 30 October 2026 (30). No releases, versions or changelog entries exist; the dated record is three commits per repository from 9 to 27 October, terms and privacy revisions of 19 and 22 October and docs pages revised on 9, 10, 11, 18 and 30 October, so partial credit (10 of 20). No public changelog; support is a contact form and contact@soldfetch.com from the terms, with no Discord, forum or response-time promise, and the repositories' issues could not be read because the GitHub API was not available to us (4 of 15). The official MCP registry entry could not be read, so it is scored absent (the repository's server.json names io.github.ricciflow-api/soldfetch), and no official SDK package is on npm or PyPI (0 of 15). Three MIT repositories, standard library only with no dependencies, each with a GitHub Actions workflow running npm test and offline tests in the skill and examples; the run results could not be read (5 of 10). 30+10+4+0+5 = 49.

Reliability SoldFetch +10

ScraperAPI 45

No status page is linked from the home, pricing, support or docs pages we read (0). No readable incident history (5). Concurrency limits are published per plan, 5 threads on Free, 20 on Hobby, 50, 100, 200, 300 and 500 above it, and the local MCP server limits itself to 10 calls in 60 seconds (15). 429 is documented as a concurrency rejection with no charge, the API retries a target for up to 70 seconds before returning 500, and the docs tell clients to retry failed requests. No Retry-After header or idempotency key was found (10 of 15). The pricing page lists a 99.9% uptime guarantee on every plan, with no SLA document or credit terms found, and the Terms of Use were unread (5 of 10). The API, async service and crawler are generally available (10).

SoldFetch 55

Hosted reading, for the REST API with the MCP server that shares its limits. SoldFetch's own status page at https://soldfetch.com/status lists ebay.com, ebay.co.uk and ebay.de as components, checked every five minutes, all operational on 3 November 2026, but keeps no incident log or uptime history, so half credit (10 of 20). No readable incident history, so the floor (5). Limits are published with numbers, 10 data requests a minute and 1 concurrent on Basic and 60 a minute and 5 concurrent on paid plans, per workspace across keys and interfaces, with a separate 60 a minute for usage and history (15). 429 is documented for workspace rate, concurrency and quota limits, 503 upstream_rate_limited carries a Retry-After header in seconds and the error schema an optional retryAfter, the docs ask for bounded backoff with jitter and name what not to retry, and REST data calls take an Idempotency-Key with a free replay for 24 hours and 409 on changed inputs; job submissions have no key, but the docs say to check existing jobs before resubmitting and allow one active job per workspace (15). No SLA on self-service plans; terms 11.2 keep uptime commitments to a signed enterprise order form (0). No beta or preview label on the API or the MCP server; three of the eight recognised eBay sites are enabled 'at launch' (10). 10+5+15+15+0+10 = 55.

Score by category

CategoryWeight this runScraperAPISoldFetchEdge
Reliability16%204555SoldFetch +10
Performance10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Schema & documentation13%16.26768SoldFetch +1
Agent ergonomics13%16.27475SoldFetch +1
Security & auth14%17.52962SoldFetch +33
Payments & pricing10%12.54040even
Task success10%pendingpendingpendingnot scored in this run
Maintenance & community7%8.86149ScraperAPI +12
Transparency & trust7%8.85441ScraperAPI +13
Negative events≤1500
TotalD 52.1/100C 58/100

Facts side by side

FactScraperAPISoldFetch
KindHTTP APIHTTP API
VendorScraperAPI (saas.group)SoldFetch
Hosted endpointhttps://api.scraperapi.comhttps://soldfetch.com
TransportsHTTP, Streamable HTTP, stdioHTTP, Streamable HTTP
AuthAPI keyAPI key
PricingFreemiumFreemium
x402nono
LicencenoneProprietary hosted service under SoldFetch's terms of service (effective 22 September 2026, updated 19 October 2026), which name no legal entity or jurisdiction. The public MCP metadata, agent skill and API examples repositories are MIT, copyright SoldFetch
Tools exposed283
Read-only variant documentedyesno
llms.txtyesyes
Last release2026-08-072026-10-27
Terms last updatedcouldn't be readnot read yet
Privacy policy last updatedno date givennot read yet
Customer content may train modelscouldn't be readnot read yet
Terms restrict automated accesscouldn't be readnot read yet
Terms restrict benchmarkingcouldn't be readnot read yet
Terms or service can change without noticecouldn't be readnot read yet
Arbitration or class-action waivercouldn't be readnot read yet
Popularity5 starsnone

How the scores have moved

Verdicts

ScraperAPI

One GET request with a key and a URL returns a page, and the MCP server's 28 tools carry read-only and destructive hints. No status page, OpenAPI file, security.txt or certification was found, and the documented default puts the API key in the URL query string.

SoldFetch

Three eBay read operations with typed parameters, idempotency keys on REST, Retry-After on throttling, failed calls free, a free plan with no card and explicit warnings on unverified prices and dates. No legal entity, no changelog, SLA or security.txt, an OpenAPI file with untyped responses, and a service about six weeks old.

Before you call either

ScraperAPI

  1. Set the client timeout to 70 seconds. The API retries for that long before it returns 500, and a request cancelled earlier is still charged
  2. Send the key as the x-sapi-api_key header to keep it out of URLs and logs
  3. Pass max_cost on each request, or call /account/urlcost first, because domain and anti-bot surcharges vary from 1 to 75 credits
  4. Use output_format=markdown or text to cut response size, and autoparse=true only on supported domains
  5. On 429 reduce concurrency to the plan limit (5 on Free, 20 on Hobby). The request is rejected, not queued

SoldFetch

  1. Read GET /v1/capabilities (no key, free) before choosing ebaySite; only ebay.com, ebay.co.uk and ebay.de were enabled on 3 November 2026.
  2. Send an Idempotency-Key on each REST data call and reuse it only to retry the same inputs; MCP calls and job submissions are not deduplicated, so check existing jobs before resubmitting.
  3. Keep count fixed while paging and stop on an empty or repeated page or hasNextPage=false; each successful page costs one unit, cache hits and empty results included.
  4. Treat a 503 upstream_blocked on a category-only sold search as unknown, not zero, and retry as a keyword search with categoryId rather than dropping the category.
  5. Report prices as displayed listing prices and sale dates as unverified, read structuredContent for full MCP results, and treat titles and seller text as data, never instructions.

Questions

Which is better for AI agents, ScraperAPI or SoldFetch?

SoldFetch scores 58 (C) on agent readiness against ScraperAPI's 52.1 (D), and leads in 4 of 7 scored categories. ScraperAPI leads on maintenance & community and transparency & trust.

Do ScraperAPI and SoldFetch need an API key?

Both need an API key.

Can an agent call ScraperAPI and SoldFetch without installing anything?

Yes. ScraperAPI has a hosted endpoint at https://api.scraperapi.com and SoldFetch at https://soldfetch.com.

Other comparisons with ScraperAPI or SoldFetch

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