The Cheaper API Was 2.5x Cheaper. It Cost 1.6x More. (opens in new tab)

AI-disclosure: AI-assisted draft, human-reviewed. The demo numbers are the verbatim stdout of a deterministic, stdlib-only Python script included in full below — re-run it and you get the same bytes. The attempt counts in that script are a SYNTHETIC fixture I chose to exercise the accounting mechanism, calibrated to the retry skew I see in my own scraper logs (run counts from my Apify history). It is NOT a benchmark of any named vendor's API or prices. The one external claim (the cost-per-suc...