How product data APIs are priced

The pricing models you will see

Vendors meter different things, so the same workload can cost very different amounts depending on the model. Here is how a few of them describe their own pricing, as published on their sites on the date shown.

ShopSavvy’s Data API uses credits: each operation has a fixed credit cost, and monthly plans include a credit allowance (Starter $49 for 1,000, Professional $199 for 10,000, Scale $499 for 50,000), with Enterprise priced by quote above that.

Side-by-side comparisons → Starting prices, models and trade-offs for the main product data APIs, each with its source and check date.

What actually drives the bill

• How many products you look up, and how often. A thousand SKUs checked daily is thirty times the lookups of the same list checked monthly.
• Which data you ask for. Current offers at every retailer usually cost more than a product record; price history adds a charge for the length of the window.
• Whether misses are charged. Barcodes that match nothing, and products with no offers, cost money on some APIs and nothing on others.
• How many retailers you need per product, if the vendor prices per retailer or per page fetched.
• Refreshes. Some services charge every time they re-check a price you are monitoring; others charge once to schedule it.

What each ShopSavvy operation costs

Errors cost nothing, and identifiers that match no product, or products with no offers, cost 0 credits. Every response reports the credits it used and how many remain.

Two worked examples

A barcode-scanning app that looks up 3,000 codes a month at every retailer, where 70% of codes come back with offers: 2,100 products × 3 credits = 6,300 credits a month, which fits Professional ($199 a month for 10,000 credits).

A repricing feed that checks 1,000 SKUs at one retailer every day: 1,000 × 30 × 2 credits = 60,000 credits a month, which is more than any self-serve plan includes, so a custom plan. Checking every other day halves it, which is why the frequency question comes first.

Product data API cost calculator → Put in your own volumes, hit rate and history needs and see the credits and the cheapest plan.

Costs that are not on the pricing page

• Rate limits. A cheap plan that caps requests below your peak forces a bigger plan or a queue (ShopSavvy: 1,000 requests per rolling hour per account, up to 100 identifiers per request).
• Overage and hard stops. Find out whether running out means an overage bill or refused requests until the period resets.
• Currency and region. A plan priced in another currency, or data from another marketplace, changes the real cost.
• Refunds and commitments. Read the cancellation and refund terms, and whether annual plans lock you in.
• Your own engineering time to integrate, match identifiers and store what you need to keep.

Web scraping vs a product data API → When building it yourself costs less, and when it does not.