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Not every web scraping task requires a full headless browser. If you are extracting data from content websites, spinning up a browser is often overkill. To solve this, the Geekflare API offers Lite Web Scraping. By disabling JavaScript rendering in your API request, our backend will perform a fast HTTP request. This drastically reduces response times and cuts your API costs in half.

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Credit Costs

The Geekflare Web Scraping API charges based on the compute power required to fetch your data:
ModeParameter SettingCost per RequestDescription
Lite ScrapingrenderJS: false1 CreditNo browser loaded. Lightning fast.
Standard ScrapingrenderJS: true (Default)2 CreditsFull headless browser. Executes JavaScript and waits for DOM to render.
Note: renderJS defaults to true if omitted from your request. To take advantage of 1-credit Lite Scraping, you must explicitly set it to false.

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How to Use Lite Scraping

To trigger a Lite scraping request, pass "renderJS": false in your payload. Example Request: 
POST https://api.geekflare.com/webscraping

{
  "url": "https://example.com",
  "renderJS": false
}

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Use Cases for Lite Scraping

Lite scraping is optimized for low-security, static, or content websites where the core text is present in the initial HTML response. ✅ When to use Lite Scraping (1 Credit):
  • Blogs: Extracting content from blogs or standard news outlets.
  • Documentation: Scraping Readmes, or developer documentation.
  • High-Volume Batch Processing: When you need to scrape tens of thousands of URLs quickly and cost-effectively.
✅ When to use Standard Scraping (2 Credits):
  • Single Page Applications (SPAs): Sites built with React, Vue, or Angular that require JavaScript to load the content.
  • High-Security Sites: E-commerce platforms or sites protected by heavy anti-bot challenges that check for real browser fingerprints.
  • Dynamic Elements: Pages where you need to wait for charts, comments, or scroll elements to load.
💡 If you are building an AI agent or RAG pipeline, the most cost-effective and fastest way to get data is to combine Lite Scraping with our LLM-optimized output formats. By sending {"renderJS": false, "format": "markdown-llm"}, you get token-optimized Markdown delivered in seconds, all for just 1 API credit.

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Using Proxies with Lite Scraping

Some blogs or websites enforce strict IP-based rate limits or geo-blocking, even if they don’t require JavaScript rendering. To bypass these restrictions, you can pair Lite Scraping with our premium proxy network by using proxy mode ("proxyCountry": us). Learn more about using proxies. Using a proxy will add 2 additional credits to your request.
  • Lite Scraping ("renderJS": false): 1 Credit
  • Premium Proxy ("proxyCountry": us): +2 Credits
  • Total Cost: 3 Credits per request
Example Request: 
{
  "url": "https://news.example.com/article",
  "renderJs": false,
  "proxyCountry": "us"
}