upAPI vs Bright Data
Proxy infrastructure you do not have to become a customer of.
How Bright Data charges
No single plan ladder — each product carries its own rate card. The nav leads with "starts from $1 per 1,000 requests" for Unlocker, Crawl and SERP, the Browser API from $5 per GB, residential bandwidth listed at $5 per GB and currently promoted at $2.5, and dataset records from $250 per 100,000 — and the larger commitments are quoted rather than published.
How upAPI charges
Four published tiers from $0, one weighted unit price per operation, and residential and datacenter proxy egress included in that price rather than metered beside it.
USD 29 / mo · USD 0.29 per 1,000 units · full pricing
Last checked 2026-09-14. Bright Data figures here were read from their own pages on that date. We do not restate a competitor’s number we have not seen ourselves, and where they publish none we say so; if this date has aged, check theirs before ours.
Bright Data and upAPI are aimed at different buyers, and pretending otherwise would be the kind of claim that gets a comparison page ignored. Their rate cards start where a serious data operation starts; a per-GB line and a per-100,000-records line are the right shape for a team that already knows their volumes and wants the lowest marginal rate at that scale.
The mismatch is earlier in the curve. A developer wiring three or ten sources into one product cannot forecast gigabytes before building the thing that consumes them, and a per-product rate card means every new source is a new decision, a new meter and possibly a new contract. That overhead is felt long before the marginal price is.
So the trade is explicit: you give up the largest IP pool and the enterprise process, and you get a single published price, one key, pooled units and proxy cost folded into the call. At small and medium volume that is usually the cheaper answer in total cost, once the integration time is counted.
Where Bright Data wins
- Scale and IP diversity. Their proxy network is one of the largest in the world; at genuinely high volume, on hard targets, that is a real and durable advantage.
- Compliance and enterprise process. KYC, a compliance team, DPAs and named account managers exist and matter if your legal department needs them.
- Product depth per surface — unblocking, SERP, dataset delivery and browser APIs are each a full product rather than a single endpoint.
Where upAPI wins
- You can see the whole price on one page and start on the same afternoon, without a sales call and without a bandwidth estimate you have no way to make before you have run the job.
- Bandwidth is not a line item. A residential-IP read here costs 15 weighted units whether the page is 200KB or 2MB — we absorb the variance, which is exactly the variance a per-GB bill makes you carry.
- One key spans data sources, not just proxies. Maps, social, finance, developer data, OCR and browser rendering are the same key and the same quota, so a small team wires up one integration rather than one per surface.
- Agent access without a key on disk. The hosted MCP server signs you in through the browser over OAuth 2.1 + PKCE and meters tool calls on the same pooled quota as a curl — not a token pasted into a config file, and not a second meter per product.
What switching actually costs
There is no proxy configuration to migrate — egress selection is per-operation and already tuned, with datacenter IPs on Maps and residential on the social reads. If you do need your own exit IPs for consistency across a chain, you can supply them per call.
Other comparisons: Apify, ScraperAPI, Serper, ApyHub, RapidAPI, ScrapingBee, Firecrawl, ScreenshotOne.