Outscraper Alternatives: 4 Cheaper Tools for Google Maps Scraping (2026)

Outscraper advertises Google Maps data at $3 per 1,000 records. The people discussing it on Reddit tell a different story: surprise invoices of $200 to $300, large jobs that crawl for hours with no ETA, and a bill that quietly quadruples once you add emails and reviews.

So we did what a developer would do. We looked for outscraper alternatives by pulling every pricing page, doing the math per 1,000 complete records, and ignoring the marketing. The conclusion surprised us: the real problem is not Outscraper’s rates, it is per-record billing itself.

We run a suite of data extraction APIs with 700+ active users, so we live inside this billing math every day. Our own Google Maps scraper API is one of the four tools below, ranked first, and we will show the numbers that justify that instead of asking you to trust us.

The short version: for developers, per-request billing wins. 1,000 Google Maps businesses cost about $0.08 through FlyByAPIs, $3 through Outscraper, and $12 per 1,000 once Outscraper’s enrichment add-ons stack on top.

Let’s start with why people leave.

Why developers switch away from Outscraper

Let’s be fair first: Outscraper is a legitimate product. The free tier of 500 records per month is genuinely useful, the service catalog is huge, and for a one-off small job it works fine. Nobody switches because the product is fake.

People switch because of three specific problems that show up the moment you scale past hobby volume. The Reddit thread asking for Outscraper replacements ranks first for this search, above every review site, which tells you how common the frustration is.

Notice what all three have in common: billing and operations, never the data itself. Which is good news, actually. You fix it by picking a different pricing model, and a fancier scraper would have solved nothing.

How much does Outscraper cost, really?

Here is the pricing straight from their page, checked in August 2026. Each service has three tiers, and the tiers reset every 30 days.

Each line looks cheap in isolation, but a usable lead needs several lines at once. Want 1,000 businesses with verified emails and their reviews? You are running four separate services against the same 1,000 records.

And remember problem number one from the previous section: there is no default spending limit while all this runs. The advertised $3 is real, but it is the price of the least useful version of the data.

The real problem is per-record billing

Here is the part every other comparison skips, and it is the reason we wrote this post. Outscraper charges per record: every row in your output is a billing unit. That model punishes exactly the workload Google Maps is best at, which is search.

Think about what a Maps search actually returns: one query like “dentists in Denver” produces a page of up to 200 businesses. Under per-record billing you pay one unit per business for that single operation. Under per-request billing you pay for one API call, whatever it returns.

We benchmarked this same effect across the whole scraping market in our breakdown of web scraping API billing models , and the pattern holds everywhere.

On search-style workloads, per-record vendors end up 16x to 33x more expensive than a per-request Google Maps data extraction API for the same output. This Outscraper comparison comes out even wider.

Do you see what this means? The cheapest tool is not the one with the smallest number on the pricing page, it is the one whose billing unit matches your workload. With that lens, let’s rank the four tools.

The 4 best Outscraper alternatives, compared on real cost

Same yardstick for everyone: what does it cost to get 1,000 Google Maps businesses, and what does the complete version of that data cost? Outscraper sits in the last row as the baseline.

One honest note before the deep dives: these tools are not interchangeable. Two are developer APIs, two are no-code dashboards, and the “emails included” column matters a lot if you cannot write code.

The order is developer-first, which is why Lobstr.io’s cheap credits do not outrank the APIs. It assumes you can make an HTTP request, and if that is you, the Google Maps API plans in the winning row start at $0.

1. FlyByAPIs Google Maps Extractor API: pay per request, not per record

Yes, this is our product, and we put it first, so here is the math to judge whether that is earned. Our Google Maps data extraction API bills per request. One /locate_and_search call returns up to 20 businesses, so 1,000 businesses take 50 requests.

On the Pro plan, $19.99 buys 15,000 requests, which prices a request at $0.0015 and those 50 requests at about $0.08. The same 1,000 base records cost $3 at Outscraper, and $12 to $14 with the enrichment stack. At Ultra volume ($89.99 for 150K requests) the per-request price drops further.

The whole thing in Python, one call, up to 200 structured businesses back:

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import requests

url = "https://google-maps-extractor2.p.rapidapi.com/locate_and_search"

params = {
    "query": "dentists in Denver, CO",
    "language": "en",
    "country": "us",
    "limit": "20",
    "zoom": "13",
}

headers = {
    "X-RapidAPI-Key": "YOUR_API_KEY",
    "X-RapidAPI-Host": "google-maps-extractor2.p.rapidapi.com",
}

response = requests.get(url, headers=headers, params=params)

for b in response.json().get("data", []):
    print(f"{b['name']} · {b.get('rating')}⭐ ({b.get('reviews_count')} reviews)")
    print(f"  {b.get('full_address')}")
    print(f"  {b.get('phone')} | {b.get('website_url')}")

Every record includes name, full address, phone, website, rating, review count, categories, coordinates, and opening hours. Paginate with offset to walk past the first page. The full endpoint docs cover all 8 endpoints if you want the details.

Reviews deserve their own paragraph, because this is where per-record billing hurts most. The official Google Places API caps reviews at 5 per business , and Outscraper bills reviews as a separate $3 per 1,000 service.

The /business_reviews endpoint of our Google Maps reviews API has no review cap and no per-review fee: a request returns a page of full reviews, and it is billed like any other request.

Those weaknesses are real. If you cannot write a script and you need emails in a CSV tomorrow, skip to Scrap.io below. But if you are a developer feeding a database, a lead-gen product, or an analysis pipeline, the per-request model is not 20% cheaper, it is a different order of magnitude.

2. Apify: best for custom scrapers beyond Google Maps

Apify is the platform play: a marketplace of 5,000+ hosted scrapers (they call them actors) plus the excellent open-source Crawlee SDK for building your own. If your project touches ten different websites, this breadth is the selling point.

For Google Maps specifically, the popular actors land around $2.10 to $4 per 1,000 places, and closer to $15 per 1,000 once you add email extraction actors. Then compute units, actor rental fees, and proxy costs stack on top, which is why we called the billing model “nearly impossible to forecast” above.

We wrote a full teardown of the compute-unit trap in our Apify alternatives comparison , so we will not repeat it here. The one-line version: Apify is a great platform that happens to be a mediocre deal for single-target extraction.

3. Scrap.io: best no-code option, filters before you pay

Scrap.io is a Google Maps specialist with one clever idea: you filter before you extract. Want only businesses with a website, a phone number, and more than 50 reviews? Apply those 17+ filters first, and your credits only buy leads that match.

That flips Outscraper’s weakness on its head. Instead of paying for 1,000 records and discarding 600, you pay for the 400 you keep. Emails, phones, and social profiles come included in the credit price, no add-on stack.

4. Lobstr.io: cheapest no-code credits, beyond just Maps

Lobstr.io is the budget pick among the no-code tools: about $2 per 1,000 base results, or $3 per 1,000 for complete leads with emails and validation. That undercuts both Outscraper’s stacked price and Scrap.io’s credit price.

It also covers more than Maps: review platforms and social sites are in the catalog, with a live console that shows extraction progress in real time. That progress visibility is a direct answer to one of Outscraper’s most-cited annoyances.

Free options before you pay anyone

Fair question, since “free” is the second most common thing people search alongside this topic. These are the real $0 options, with their catches.

Our advice after years of running both: prototype on free tiers, and only go DIY if scraping itself is the thing you want to learn. The moment your data feeds something real, maintenance time costs more than any plan here. When you outgrow the free tier, you can scrape Google Maps businesses by API from the same code you prototyped with, just with a bigger quota.

Which tool should you pick?

Four tools, four different bets. The decision in one screen:

One last practical note. If Maps is only part of your data stack, the same per-request billing logic applies to the rest of ours: a Google Search API for SERP data, an Amazon scraper API for product and pricing data, a Crunchbase scraper API for company and funding records, a jobs search API for listings, and a multi-format translation API if that data crosses languages.

The bottom line

Remember the Reddit thread from the beginning, with people staring at $300 invoices? None of them got scammed. They just used a per-record tool for a search workload, and the billing model did exactly what billing models do.

That is the whole lesson of this comparison. Match the billing unit to the workload: per-request for developers pulling Maps data at scale, included-enrichment subscriptions for no-code lead lists, a platform when you scrape the whole internet. Get that right, and every tool on this list beats the stacked $12 to $14 baseline.

If you are the developer in that story, the Google Maps Extractor API page has the full endpoint list, live pricing, and the FAQ. The free tier is 100 requests a month, which is enough to run the code above about a hundred times and check our math yourself.

P.S. If you end up picking one of the other three tools, genuinely fine. Just set a spending alert on day one. That single habit would have saved every person in that Reddit thread.

Oriol.