Price Scraping vs a Price API: Cost, Reliability and Maintenance

The short answer

Build your own price scrapers when you only need a few sites and can maintain them as those sites change. Use a price API when you need many retailers or countries, matched products and a consistent format, because the provider handles site changes, product matching and the shape of the data.

Side by side

	Your own scrapers	A price API such as Nesika Commerce
Sites covered	One scraper per site	Any retailer through one interface
Product matching	You build it	Included, without barcodes
Output	Different per site	One JSON shape for every retailer
When a site changes	Your scraper breaks	The provider handles it
Cost	Engineering time and infrastructure	Pay per successful call

What a call costs

Nesika Commerce charges in credits, only for successful calls: 5 for search_products, 3 for resolve_product, 5 for find_offers and 10 for deep_search. New accounts get 1,000 credits once, with no credit card, and then buy credit packs as needed. Current packs are on the Commerce pricing page.

A first request

curl -X POST "https://api.nesika.ai/api/v1/commerce/search-products" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $NESIKA_API_KEY" \
  -H "Idempotency-Key: $(uuidgen)" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "market": "US", "query": "iPhone 16" }'

Takeaways

Scrapers make sense for a handful of stable sites. Once you need many retailers, matched products or more than one country, an API is usually cheaper than the engineering time to keep scrapers working. Follow the quickstart to try it.

Make your first Commerce API call.

Read the quickstart →