Zyte API review

Pricing and site tiers

Zyte bills per 1,000 successful responses. The rate depends on whether you ask for the raw HTTP response or a browser-rendered page, and on which of five tiers the target site is in. As of October 2026 the pricing page names them Simple, Easy, Moderate, Complex and Advanced and lets you paste a URL to see a site's price. It doesn't explain how sites are assigned, so you look prices up rather than calculate them.

Monthly commitments of $100, $200 or $500 lower every rate; at $500 the range is $0.06–$0.61 (HTTP) and $0.48–$7.68 (browser). New accounts get $5 of credit for 30 days. Pay-as-you-go has no minimum, so an idle month costs nothing.

What 1,000 pages cost

Take 50,000 product pages a month from a Moderate site: 50 × $0.44 = $22 in HTTP mode, 50 × $4.02 = $201 rendered. Rated Advanced, the same job costs $63.50 or $804. Rendering is 7.8× the HTTP price on Simple sites and 12.7× on Advanced ones, so the biggest saving is avoiding the browser: check whether your data is already in the raw HTML or a JSON request the page makes. The two modes are one field apart:

# HTTP mode (HTTP column); the body comes back base64-encoded
curl --user "$ZYTE_API_KEY:" --compressed \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data '{"url": "https://example.com/", "httpResponseBody": true}' \
  https://api.zyte.com/v1/extract

# Browser mode (browser column): HTML after JavaScript has run
curl --user "$ZYTE_API_KEY:" --compressed \
  --header 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  --data '{"url": "https://example.com/", "browserHtml": true}' \
  https://api.zyte.com/v1/extract

Zyte's docs warn the two can return different HTML. For comparison, Bright Data's Web Unlocker charges a flat $1.50 per 1,000 with rendering included: on pay-as-you-go, Zyte's browser mode is cheaper only on Simple sites, its HTTP mode on every tier. The Oxylabs Web API also charges $1.50 with JavaScript, but only on a subscription. Try your own mix in the cost calculator.

Features and Scrapy

Zyte API is one endpoint with automatic unblocking; the pricing page says datacenter and residential proxies, rendering "and more" are included. The bigger draw is Scrapy, which scrapy.org says is "maintained by Zyte with over 500 other contributors". Scrapy can't run JavaScript itself; you add scrapy-playwright, or the scrapy-zyte-api plugin, which routes requests through Zyte API for "automatic proxy rotation, browser fingerprinting, and ban avoidance" while your spiders and pipelines stay as they are. Scrapy Cloud hosts the spiders (shub deploy): one unit free, then from $9 per unit per month. To weigh that against self-hosting, see the open-source frameworks guide and the build vs buy guide.

Independent evidence

These are third-party results: Proxyway earns from affiliate links and ScrapeOps runs a paid proxy aggregator.

• Proxyway Web Scraping API Report 2025 (tested October 2025, published 3 December 2025): first of ten at 93.14% across 15 protected sites at 2 requests per second, ahead of Decodo (85.88%) and Oxylabs (85.82%), averaging 11.15 s per response. Bright Data did not take part.
• Proxyway 2024 report: 98.38%, with the fastest responses (6.61 s).
• ScrapeOps fingerprint test (January 2026): 80.48, against 41.43 for Bright Data's Unlocker, 30.00 for Oxylabs' Unblocker, 27.81 for ScraperAPI and 24.76 for ScrapingBee.
• ScrapeOps Cloudflare playbook (June 2026): scraping APIs as a group passed about 97% of Cloudflare sites, versus 0–35% for self-hosted stealth browsers (a category figure, not Zyte's alone).

Fifteen sites is a sample, not your target list. On Trustpilot, Zyte has 4.2 from just 28 reviews, 39% of them 1-star and mostly about billing: watch spend closely at first.

Where it fits

Our guides pick products by use case. Zyte API is picked in:

• Web scraping APIs guide: Strongest current independent evidence

The case is the evidence above (Proxyway 2025 and 2024, ScrapeOps January 2026) plus success-only, pay-as-you-go billing. Other tools fit better in these cases:

• You want one predictable price. Bright Data's Web Unlocker is a flat $1.50 per 1,000 with rendering included, cheaper than Zyte's browser mode on every tier above Simple. Its best evidence is older (97.90% in Proxyway's 2024 report) and its KYC is strict.
• You scrape steadily and a subscription is fine. The Oxylabs Web API charges $1.50 per 1,000 rendered pages on its $30 Starter plan and $1.22 on bigger plans, but it was rebuilt in October 2026, after every benchmark.
• Your targets are lightly protected. Scrapy or Crawlee with per-GB residential proxies costs far less; see the proxy guide.

How picks are chosen is explained on the methodology page.

Pros and cons