A ScrapingBee alternative that only bills when data comes back, and speaks MCP.
ScrapingBee is a capable request-based scraping API. The catch most people come looking to escape is the same one: you spend credits on every request, including the ones a bot wall or captcha turned into nothing usable, and you still write the parsing yourself. Haunt sends a URL and a plain-English prompt, hands back clean JSON, and only charges when the call actually returns data. It runs as an MCP server too, so an agent calls it as a native tool.
The short version
Haunt does one job well. Point it at a page, describe what you want in plain English, get clean JSON back. No credits burned on blocked pages, no HTML left for you to parse.
If that is the job you have, it is the sharper tool for it.
You pay only when it actually works.
Credit-per-request pricing charges you the moment a page is fetched, whether or not the result was usable. A bot wall, a captcha, or an empty render still spends your credits. Over a month of hard pages that adds up quietly. Haunt does not charge for a call that cannot return data. Full stop.
Structured JSON, not raw HTML
Most scraping APIs hand back the page and leave the extraction to you: selectors, parsing, and the upkeep when the site changes. Haunt takes a plain-English prompt and returns the JSON you asked for, with grounding checks so it never invents a field that was not on the page.
The differences that actually change your day.
Honest comparison, only the axes that matter when you are choosing between us.
| Haunt | ScrapingBee | |
|---|---|---|
| Blocked, captcha or empty pages | Free. You pay only when data comes back. | Credits are spent per request, including ones that returned nothing usable. |
| Getting the data out | Plain-English prompt in, clean JSON out. Grounding checks mean no fabricated fields. | You get the page and write the extraction and parsing yourself. |
| Using it from an agent | Native MCP server and a REST API. An agent calls it directly. | REST API. You build the agent wrapper. |
ScrapingBee details from scrapingbee.com, checked 8 July 2026. If anything is out of date, tell us and we will correct it. Honest comparisons only.
An honest no beats a confident fake yes.
The failure that hurts most is the silent one. A page is blocked, and instead of saying so, a tool hands back an empty or invented result that poisons everything your agent does next, and you do not even know it happened. Haunt refuses to return data it cannot find on the page. That is the whole point of it.
Built for agents, not dashboards
Haunt ships as an MCP server as well as a REST API, so an agent in Claude or another runtime calls it as a native tool. No wrapper to write, no page content kept after the call.
Point it at a page that's been giving you trouble.
One API call, or one MCP tool. 1,000 free credits, no card. If it can't read the page it tells you and charges you nothing. That is the whole pitch.