Jina Reader is a great free way to turn a URL into markdown. When you need predictable per-request pricing, proxies for protected sites, and structured AI extraction, WebScraping.AI is built for production scraping.
2,000 free API credits · No credit card required
An honest, side-by-side comparison. Verify the numbers — this is a market where you should.
| WebScraping.AI | Jina AI | |
|---|---|---|
| Product focus | Web scraping API | Search foundation (embeddings, rerankers, reader) — now part of Elastic |
| Pricing model | Fixed credits per request type, published | Token-metered — cost scales with page length |
| Billing on failures | Free — only successful requests | Free — tokens not deducted |
| Rate limits | Concurrency-based, scales with plan | 20 RPM keyless / 500 RPM free key / 5,000 RPM premium |
| Proxy options | Datacenter, residential, stealth — published credit costs | Rotating proxy via x-proxy (country selection) |
| Anti-bot (stealth) tier | Yes (50 credits) | — |
| JS (Chromium) rendering | Yes | Yes (x-engine: browser) |
| Natural-language Q&A (<code>/ai/question</code>) | Yes | — (separate DeepSearch product) |
| AI field extraction | Yes (/ai/fields) |
— (markdown out, extraction is your LLM's job) |
| LLM-ready markdown / text | Yes (/text) |
Yes (native) |
| Web search API | — | Yes (s.jina.ai) |
| Open source / self-host | — | Yes (Apache-2.0) |
| First-party MCP server | Yes | Yes (mcp.jina.ai) |
| Official SDKs | 7 languages | REST + request headers |
Pricing and credit costs last checked July 2026. Sources: Jina AI pricing · WebScraping.AI pricing.
No tool is right for everyone. Jina AI is a capable product, and these are the areas where it genuinely shines — worth weighing before you switch.
s.jina.ai), embeddings, rerankers, and DeepSearch make it a strong RAG grounding toolkit, not just a scraper.The most common reasons teams evaluate a switch.
Reader bills by output tokens, so a long page costs many times more than a short one — and there's no way to know the cost before you fetch. WebScraping.AI charges a fixed, published credit cost per request type, whatever the page size.
Keyless access is capped at 20 RPM, a free key at 500 RPM, and higher throughput requires a premium key. Batch pipelines hit these walls at exactly the wrong time. WebScraping.AI plans are sized by request volume with concurrency that scales with your plan.
Sites that challenge datacenter IPs — the Cloudflare and DataDome class — are a known Reader failure mode. WebScraping.AI offers residential (10–25 credits) and stealth (50 credits) proxies purpose-built for protected sites, each at a published cost.
Reader hands you clean markdown; turning it into structured data is your LLM's job — extra code, extra tokens, extra latency. WebScraping.AI's /ai/question and /ai/fields return answers and typed fields directly, for a flat +5 credits.
Elastic acquired Jina AI in October 2025, and the team's stated focus is embeddings, rerankers, and models running inside Elasticsearch. Reader continues, but its roadmap now serves Elastic's search platform. WebScraping.AI's only product is its scraping API.
Every request type has a fixed, published credit cost — no surprises, and you only pay for successful requests.
Plans from $29/mo (250k credits) · $99/mo (1M) · $249/mo (3M). Failed requests are always free. See full pricing.
Jina Reader's pricing is honest — failures aren't billed and light use is free — but it meters output tokens. A documentation page that renders to 40,000 tokens costs 40× a landing page that renders to 1,000, and you only find out after the fetch. Budgeting a 100K-page crawl means guessing an average page size and hoping.
WebScraping.AI charges a fixed credit cost per request type — 1 credit for a plain fetch, 5 with JS rendering, 10–25 for residential, 50 for stealth, +5 for AI extraction — published up front. The same crawl costs the same whether the pages are short or long, so you can size a plan before you start.
Reader is superb at converting reachable pages. Its x-proxy option adds rotating IPs with country selection, but there is no dedicated anti-bot tier — and sites that challenge datacenter traffic (Reddit, X, LinkedIn, anything behind Cloudflare or DataDome) are the classic case where a request that worked yesterday starts failing.
WebScraping.AI is built proxy-first: explicit datacenter, residential, and stealth routing with geotargeting, each at a published credit cost. When a target hardens, you switch a parameter instead of switching vendors.
Elastic completed its acquisition of Jina AI in October 2025. Reader is not deprecated — the open-source repo was still being synced with the SaaS code as of spring 2026 — but Jina's public direction is now embeddings, rerankers, and small language models running natively inside Elasticsearch.
For teams whose pipelines depend on r.jina.ai, that's a reasonable moment to evaluate where scraping sits on the new owner's roadmap. WebScraping.AI is an independent product whose entire business is the scraping API — the roadmap and the product are the same thing.
Point your requests at WebScraping.AI — here's the equivalent call in your language.
curl -G "https://api.webscraping.ai/text" \
--data-urlencode "api_key=YOUR_API_KEY" \
--data-urlencode "url=https://example.com/article" \
--data-urlencode "text_format=plain"
# Response: clean page text, ready to feed to an LLM.
# pip install webscraping_ai
# https://pypi.org/project/webscraping-ai/
from webscraping_ai import Client
client = Client(api_key="YOUR_API_KEY")
text = client.text("https://example.com/article", text_format="plain")
print(text)
# Response: clean page text, ready to feed to an LLM.
// npm install webscraping-ai
// https://www.npmjs.com/package/webscraping-ai
import { WebScrapingAI } from 'webscraping-ai';
const client = new WebScrapingAI({ apiKey: 'YOUR_API_KEY' });
const text = await client.text({
url: 'https://example.com/article',
text_format: 'plain',
});
console.log(text);
// Response: clean page text, ready to feed to an LLM.
<?php
// composer require webscraping-ai/webscraping-ai-php
// https://packagist.org/packages/webscraping-ai/webscraping-ai-php
require 'vendor/autoload.php';
use WebScrapingAI\Client;
$client = new Client('YOUR_API_KEY');
$text = $client->text('https://example.com/article', textFormat: 'plain');
echo is_string($text) ? $text : print_r($text, true);
// Response: clean page text, ready to feed to an LLM.
# gem install webscraping_ai
# https://rubygems.org/gems/webscraping_ai
require 'webscraping_ai'
client = WebScrapingAI::Client.new(api_key: 'YOUR_API_KEY')
text = client.text('https://example.com/article', text_format: 'plain')
puts text.inspect
# Response: clean page text, ready to feed to an LLM.
// go get github.com/webscraping-ai/webscraping-ai-go/v4
// https://pkg.go.dev/github.com/webscraping-ai/webscraping-ai-go/v4
package main
import (
"context"
"fmt"
webscrapingai "github.com/webscraping-ai/webscraping-ai-go/v4"
)
func main() {
client, _ := webscrapingai.NewClient(&webscrapingai.Config{APIKey: "YOUR_API_KEY"})
text, _ := client.Text(context.Background(), &webscrapingai.TextOptions{
URL: "https://example.com/article",
TextFormat: "plain",
})
fmt.Println(text)
}
// Response: clean page text, ready to feed to an LLM.
// Maven: ai.webscraping:webscraping-ai:4.0.0
// https://central.sonatype.com/artifact/ai.webscraping/webscraping-ai
import ai.webscraping.Client;
import ai.webscraping.Config;
import ai.webscraping.option.TextOptions;
Client client = new Client(Config.builder().apiKey("YOUR_API_KEY").build());
String text = client.text(TextOptions.builder()
.url("https://example.com/article")
.textFormat("plain")
.build());
System.out.println(text);
// Response: clean page text, ready to feed to an LLM.
// dotnet add package WebScrapingAI
// https://www.nuget.org/packages/WebScrapingAI
using WebScrapingAI;
var client = new WebScrapingAIClient(new WebScrapingAIClientOptions { ApiKey = "YOUR_API_KEY" });
var text = await client.TextAsync(new TextRequest {
Url = "https://example.com/article",
TextFormat = "plain",
});
Console.WriteLine(text);
// Response: clean page text, ready to feed to an LLM.
s.jina.ai) or Jina's embeddings, rerankers, and DeepSearch for a RAG stack.Is WebScraping.AI a good Jina AI alternative?
It is when you've outgrown a free reader. Jina Reader excels at turning URLs into markdown for light and prototype use; WebScraping.AI adds fixed published per-request pricing, residential and stealth proxies for protected sites, and AI extraction endpoints — the things production scraping pipelines need.
What is the best Jina Reader alternative for production scraping?
For pipelines that need predictable costs and hard-site reliability, WebScraping.AI replaces r.jina.ai with a single API call: /text returns clean LLM-ready text, /html returns rendered HTML, and /ai/fields returns structured data — all at fixed credit costs, with failed requests free.
How is WebScraping.AI's pricing different from Jina AI's?
Jina Reader meters output tokens, so cost scales with page length and is unknowable before the fetch. WebScraping.AI charges a fixed, published credit cost per request type regardless of page size. Both services are honest about failures: neither bills a failed request.
Is Jina Reader deprecated after the Elastic acquisition?
No. Elastic acquired Jina AI in October 2025, and Reader remains available and maintained. Jina's stated focus, however, is now embeddings, rerankers, and models for the Elastic platform, which is why many teams are re-evaluating where a scraping dependency fits on that roadmap.
Does WebScraping.AI return LLM-ready content like r.jina.ai?
Yes. The /text endpoint returns clean page text suitable for LLM input, with JS rendering and proxy routing handled for you. Beyond that, /ai/question answers natural-language questions about a page and /ai/fields returns typed, structured fields — no downstream LLM step required.
Can WebScraping.AI scrape sites that block Jina Reader?
That's the main reason to switch. Requests can route through rotating residential proxies (10–25 credits) or stealth proxies (50 credits) designed for Cloudflare- and DataDome-protected targets where datacenter-based readers get challenged or refused.
Get started with 2,000 free API credits. No credit card required.