What is a web scraping API?

October 2026 has been a rough month for anyone who keeps API keys in the cloud. In a single week, a hosting platform reported that environment variables were decrypted by an intruder, GitLab shipped emergency fixes for a CVSS 10.0 remote code execution bug, and a popular Python package published a release that stole credentials from every machine that installed it.

If your scrapers, data pipelines or CI jobs touched any of these, assume the keys they held are exposed and rotate them. Below is a short summary of each incident from the vendors' own reports, a practical rotation checklist, and exact steps to reset your ScrapingAnt API key and proxy credentials.

Apify's monthly Starter plan is $19 with $19 of prepaid usage. That does not mean every Actor costs $19, or that its event price always has compute and proxy charges added on top. The chosen Actor's charging model determines which line items consume that allowance.

This guide starts with the current prices, then provides an offline charge-reconciliation worksheet. It helps you add known charges once and expose missing inputs. All seven example ledgers are synthetic: their Actor IDs, versions, consumption and accepted-record counts are invented test inputs. A separate worked example uses observed Actor runs on owned synthetic pages. Neither set is a customer invoice. ScrapingAnt publishes this article and sells a competing retrieval API.

Firecrawl's basic scrape costs one credit per page. Your useful unit is the result your application can accept: a complete record, rendered content, or a table with the correct cell associations. Budgeting from successful HTTP responses alone misses that difference.

This guide answers the plan-price question first, then models a recurring URL list and explains a 200-credit controlled study. The study used free credits; it measured credit consumption, not cash expenditure. ScrapingAnt publishes this article and sells a competing retrieval API. There is no ScrapingAnt head-to-head test here.