ScrapingAnt vs Zyte API

ScrapingAnt

10,000 free credits a month with no card. API Basics puts the key in the query string, so it lands in logs.

Zyte API

One POST endpoint with an OpenAPI 3 contract picks proxies, browser rendering and extraction per site, bills only successful responses, and sends problem+json errors with Retry-After. Prices vary by target site across five tiers, so cost per request isn't known before the site is assigned one, and no dated API changelog was found.

ScrapingAnt

1. Send the key in the x-api-key header rather than the query string
2. Use /v2/markdown for LLM input, and set browser=false on static pages to pay 1 credit instead of 10
3. Switch to proxy_type=residential only after a 423 (anti-bot) response. It raises a browser request from 10 to 125 credits
4. On the free plan a second concurrent request gets 409. Wait for the first to finish
5. Google, Bing and Yandex result pages come back as raw HTML through /v2/general, so you parse them yourself

Zyte API

1. Send the API key as the Basic auth username with an empty password to https://api.zyte.com/v1/extract. Set only one of httpResponseBody or browserHtml, or one extraction field
2. Ask for httpResponseBody before browserHtml. Browser requests cost about eight to thirteen times more per tier
3. Retry 429, 503 and 520 after the Retry-After seconds, with backoff. They aren't billed. Don't retry 400, 401, 422 or 451
4. Read statusCode in a 200 response. A target site's 404 comes back as a successful, billed Zyte API response
5. Have the owner set a blocking spending limit on the key you use. A 403 /auth/account-suspended means the limit or the trial month ended