> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.geekflare.com/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Lite Web Scraping

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.

## Credit Costs

The Geekflare Web Scraping API charges based on the compute power required to fetch your data:

| Mode                  | Parameter Setting          | Cost per Request | Description                                                             |
| :-------------------- | :------------------------- | :--------------- | :---------------------------------------------------------------------- |
| **Lite Scraping**     | `renderJS: false`          | **1 Credit**     | No browser loaded. Lightning fast.                                      |
| **Standard Scraping** | `renderJS: true` (Default) | **2 Credits**    | Full 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`.

## How to Use Lite Scraping

To trigger a Lite scraping request, pass `"renderJS": false` in your payload.

**Example Request:**

```json theme={null}
POST https://api.geekflare.com/webscraping

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

## 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**.

## 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](/api/using-proxies).

Using a proxy will add **2 additional credits** to your request.

* **Lite Scraping** (`"renderJS": false`): 1 Credit
* **Premium Proxy** (`"proxyCountry": us`): +5 Credits
* **Total Cost:** 6 Credits per request

**Example Request:**

```json theme={null}
{
  "url": "https://news.example.com/article",
  "renderJs": false,
  "proxyCountry": "us"
}
```