Bright Data alternative

Why people look for a Bright Data alternative

The searches around “bright data alternative” are consistent: a free or cheaper option, something that works with Claude, Cursor or n8n, an MCP server, and a bill that does not surprise. Those are the four things this page is about. We do not rank vendors or quote their prices; Bright Data publishes its own, and it is a capable product with very large proxy pools and enterprise contracts, ready datasets for purchase and a broad product line across proxies, unblocking and data.

What QuanticData does differently

• Pay per success, no subscription. A blocked page, a timeout or a retry is never billed. There is no monthly plan to size: pay-as-you-go at list price, or a paid account for a discount and a higher rate limit.
• Public unit prices. Residential Basic from $0.80/GB and Premium from $2.20/GB with country, state, city, ISP and ASN targeting, mobile from $2.30/GB, datacenter from $0.50/GB, ISP from $2.50 per IP, IPv6 from $0.083/GB, all on one account with the data APIs on top. Plans are GB bundles with a term and no monthly cap; see proxy locations.
• $2 free every month, no card. Every permanent email address renews with $2 of credit: roughly 10,000 scraped pages or 4,000 searches. Residential proxies add a free 100 MB trial.
• Proxies and APIs on one account. The residential, mobile, datacenter, ISP and IPv6 networks are the same infrastructure the APIs run on, and you can use them directly with country targeting included.
• Built for agents. Markdown output, a JSON envelope on every call, twin .md pages, llms.txt, and an MCP server that exposes every endpoint as a tool.
• Collectors instead of URLs. For the common targets, you send a keyword, a place or a product id and get typed rows, billed per delivered row.

Same job, one request

curl -X POST "https://api.quanticdata.io/v1/scrape" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer qd_live_YOUR_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://example.com", "format": "markdown"}'

Add "render": true for JavaScript pages, "extract" with CSS selectors or a JSON schema for structured output, or switch the endpoint to /v1/serp, /v1/crawl, /v1/batch. Every endpoint with a working example: Python, Node, curl, PHP.

When Bright Data is the better fit

You are buying at enterprise scale with a dedicated account team, or you need a specific ready-made dataset rather than live collection. Switching tools has a cost, and a bill that is already predictable is not a reason to switch. Try the free tier on the pages that matter to you and compare the results, not the marketing.

How to compare fairly

1. Take 100 URLs from your real targets, including the protected ones.
2. Fetch them through both services with the same options (rendering on or off) and count usable results, not HTTP 200s.
3. Divide what you paid by the usable results. Per-success billing makes that number the price; credit billing makes it a calculation.
4. Check what the output needs before your parser can use it. Markdown that is already clean saves a step per page.