Migrate from ScrapingBee

Proxlane puts one endpoint in front of the scraping APIs you already pay for, ScrapingBee included, and adds failover, block detection and cost reporting on top of the same account. Migrating is a hostname change plus three renamed parameters.

The one-line change

- https://app.scrapingbee.com/api/v1/?api_key=KEY&url=https://example.com&render_js=true
+ http://localhost:8787/v1?api_key=GATEWAY_KEY&url=https://example.com&render=true

localhost:8787 is wherever you run the gateway. There is no hosted endpoint; the quickstart starts one in about a minute.

The key changes meaning

On ScrapingBee, the key is your provider credential. On Proxlane it is the gateway's key, the one you invent when you start it. Your ScrapingBee key goes into the gateway's environment and never leaves it:

export PROXLANE_API_KEY=$(openssl rand -hex 16)   # what your client will send
export SCRAPINGBEE_KEY=...                        # what the gateway sends to ScrapingBee
docker run -p 8787:8787 -e PROXLANE_API_KEY -e SCRAPINGBEE_KEY ghcr.io/proxlane/gateway

The gateway sends your key as a Bearer header rather than in the query string, which is the form ScrapingBee's POST documentation requires and keeps the credential out of URLs that reach logs. Prefer the header on your side too:

curl -H "Authorization: Bearer $PROXLANE_API_KEY" \
  "http://localhost:8787/v1?url=https://example.com&render=true"

Parameter map

Read from the adapter's translation step, so every row is what the gateway actually sends.

Custom request headers do carry over: send them to the gateway and it applies ScrapingBee's Spb- prefix for you.

Two defaults that change, and both are in your favour

render_js defaults to true at ScrapingBee. A request that omits it renders the page and bills 5 credits. Proxlane sets the flag explicitly on every request, so a plain fetch is a plain fetch and costs 1. If your integration never sent render_js=false, your floor has been five times what it needed to be.

transparent_status_code defaults to false. Without it, a target's 404 comes back to you as a 200. The gateway pins it to true, so a 404 is a 404 and arrives as TARGET_NOT_FOUND, which never fails over to another provider because a real 404 is real everywhere.

Costs

ScrapingBee's table is a two-dimensional lookup, not a formula. As read on 2026-08-31:

premium=stealth without rendering is not sold: their own table reads "coming soon", so the gateway routes that combination elsewhere rather than guessing. Every response carries X-Cost-Estimate, and X-Cost-Source: reported means the figure came from ScrapingBee rather than this table.

Geography is narrower than you may expect

The gateway routes country_code to ScrapingBee for 42 codes, their classic-proxy list. Their premium pool reaches 243, but one capability set cannot say "these on classic, those on premium", so the honest choice is the set that holds on every tier. Ask for a country outside it and the request goes to a provider that can serve it. That matters because ScrapingBee's own behaviour is to silently fall back to us for an unsupported country, which returns a plausible page from the wrong place.

What changes for the better

A 200 with a captcha in it is no longer a success. Every body goes through a block detector before anything is called OK, and X-Detect-Rule names what fired. How that works.

A block fails over instead of failing. Add a second provider key and a request ScrapingBee cannot serve goes to the next line. Failover covers the chain and its cost.

Every response says what happened. X-Outcome and X-Outcome-Class replace status-code guessing; the outcomes page lists all of them with what to do about each, and the API reference has every parameter and header. If you sent something the gateway does not read, X-Ignored-Params names it, so wire that into your logs before you switch traffic.

Node

const url = new URL('http://localhost:8787/v1');
url.searchParams.set('url', target);
url.searchParams.set('render', 'true');        // was render_js, and was the default
url.searchParams.set('premium', 'residential'); // was premium_proxy=true

const res = await fetch(url, {
  headers: { Authorization: `Bearer ${process.env.PROXLANE_API_KEY}` },
});
console.log(res.headers.get('x-outcome'), res.headers.get('x-ignored-params'));
const html = await res.text();