Rainforest API, sold by Traject Data, is an Amazon only data API. You send an ASIN, a search term or a category, and it returns a parsed JSON product with price, offers, variants, ratings and seller details, from any Amazon marketplace. Since Amazon retired the Product Advertising API in May 2026, it has become one of the first names teams look at when the free official route closes on them.
The pricing page lists plan fees and credits. It does not tell you what a product refresh costs once overage and the extra credit options are in play, and that is where the bill moves. The rates below were read on trajectdata.com and the Rainforest API docs on October 5, 2026. Check the live page before you commit.
The seven Rainforest API plans and what each includes
The pricing page opens on yearly billing, which shows each fee 20 percent lower. The table uses the monthly prices, because that is what you pay when you start without a yearly contract.
| Plan | Per month | Credits | Overage per credit | Custom zip codes |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Hobbyist | 23 USD | 500 | 0.06 USD | 1 |
| Starter | 83 USD | 10,000 | 0.0118 USD | 1 |
| Production | 375 USD | 250,000 | 0.003 USD | 3 |
| BigData | 1,000 USD | 1,000,000 | 0.002 USD | 5 |
| ScaleUp | 2,200 USD | 2,500,000 | 0.00176 USD | 6 |
| Platform | 4,000 USD | 5,000,000 | 0.0016 USD | 10 |
| Volume | 9,000 USD | 20,000,000 | 0.0009 USD | 15 |
A free trial is offered at signup. The site's "starting at 18 USD" headline is the yearly price of Hobbyist, 23 USD less 20 percent. Enterprise contracts above Volume are quoted separately.
Rainforest API cost per 1,000 Amazon products on each plan
A standard product request is 1 credit, and so is a search results page or a best sellers page. Dividing each fee by its credits gives the price of 1,000 product lookups when you use exactly your allowance.
| Plan | Monthly billing | Yearly billing | Overage |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hobbyist | 46.00 USD | 36.80 USD | 60.00 USD |
| Starter | 8.30 USD | 6.64 USD | 11.80 USD |
| Production | 1.50 USD | 1.20 USD | 3.00 USD |
| BigData | 1.00 USD | 0.80 USD | 2.00 USD |
| ScaleUp | 0.88 USD | 0.70 USD | 1.76 USD |
| Platform | 0.80 USD | 0.64 USD | 1.60 USD |
| Volume | 0.45 USD | 0.36 USD | 0.90 USD |
For comparison, one successful page on our plans is 0.98 USD per 1,000 on Starter (49 USD for 50,000), 0.60 on Growth (149 USD for 250,000) and 0.33 on Scale (499 USD for 1,500,000), and yearly billing halves all three. Amazon or any other store, the price per page is the same.
Overage costs up to twice the plan rate
This is the detail the reviews miss. On Production and every plan above it, an overage credit costs exactly double what a credit inside the plan costs: 3.00 USD per 1,000 against 1.50 on Production, 2.00 against 1.00 on BigData, 0.90 against 0.45 on Volume. On Starter the markup is 42 percent, 11.80 against 8.30.
Two practical consequences. First, the jump from Starter to Production is huge, 10,000 credits to 250,000, and it pays off much earlier than it looks. Starter plus overage reaches the 375 USD Production fee at about 34,700 credits a month, so anyone past roughly 35,000 lookups should be on Production even though most of its allowance will go unused. Second, a catalog that grows past its plan mid month gets expensive fast. Size the plan for your peak month, not your average one.
The options that cost 2 or 3 credits per product
The product endpoint has parameters that multiply the credit cost. The docs list them on the product parameters page:
| Parameter | What it adds | Credits per request |
|---|---|---|
variant_prices | Price of each variant, such as size or color | 2 |
import_delivery | Import delivery details where Amazon shows them | 2 |
include_summarization_attributes | Summary attributes of the product | 2 |
include_image_block_videos | Videos from the image block | 2 |
skip_gtin_cache | A fresh GTIN to ASIN lookup instead of the cached one | 2 |
include_safety_product_resources | Safety documents for the product | 3 |
Variant prices are the one most teams turn on, because apparel, phone cases and supplements sell almost everything as variants. With it on, every plan's cost per 1,000 products doubles: Production becomes 3.00 USD, BigData 2.00. If you need landed cost for imported goods, duty depends on the product's tariff classification as much as on delivery, and it helps to look up the HS code once per product rather than paying extra credits on every refresh.
Real monthly budgets on Rainforest API and on flat per request pricing
Three typical jobs, priced on the cheapest Rainforest option at each volume, either the smaller plan plus overage or the next plan up, on monthly billing. With variant prices on, we count each variant as its own product page on our side, one request each, so the comparison stays fair.
| Job | Rainforest, plain | Rainforest, with variant prices | Flat per request |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1,000 products daily, 30,000 a month | about 319 USD, Starter plus overage | 375 USD, Production | 49 USD plain, 149 with variants |
| 5,000 products daily, 150,000 a month | 375 USD, Production | about 525 USD, Production plus overage | 149 USD plain, 499 with variants |
| 20,000 products daily, 600,000 a month | 1,000 USD, BigData | about 1,400 USD, BigData plus overage | 499 USD plain or with variants |
On these numbers flat pricing is cheaper in every row, by about 5 percent for 150,000 products with variant prices and by more than six times at 30,000 plain lookups. That comes with a real trade, covered in the next section: Rainforest hands you a finished Amazon schema, while we return the fields you name from the page. If you are moving off the retired Product Advertising API, our PA-API alternative page has the migration map from GetItems to a single request.
Where Rainforest API is the right buy
Amazon depth without writing selectors. Offers from every seller, reviews, questions, seller profiles and feedback, also bought products and lightning deals all come back parsed, with stable field names, across every marketplace. Rebuilding that from pages takes work, and keeping it working when Amazon changes its layout takes more.
Location pricing. Custom zip codes, from 1 on Starter to 15 on Volume, let you see the price and delivery promise a shopper in a given US area gets. If local Amazon pricing across many zip codes is the point of your product, that built in support makes Rainforest the simpler tool.
Very small volumes. At a few hundred products a month, Hobbyist at 23 USD is cheaper than our 49 USD Starter. And GTIN to ASIN lookups, for teams starting from UPC or EAN codes, are a built in feature rather than a search you have to design.
Where flat per request pricing wins
Anything beyond Amazon. A price monitoring team rarely watches one store. Walmart, Target, Best Buy, Home Depot and the brand's own site go on the same key at the same rate, which is the whole argument of our post on competitor price scraping software.
Mid volume Amazon refreshes. Between 35,000 and a million lookups a month, Rainforest's plan gaps and double rate overage mean you often pay for credits you do not use. A flat 0.33 to 0.98 USD per 1,000 pages, with nothing extra for rendering or for heavy pages, is easier to budget. The fields our Amazon scraping API returns cover price, list price, stock, rating, review count, seller and best seller rank.
Predictable invoices. If you are comparing other usage based vendors, the same arithmetic for Oxylabs, whose Amazon parser is billed per result, and ScraperAPI, which charges 5 credits per Amazon page, is in our pricing series. Every plan of ours is on the pricing page.
Questions buyers ask
How much does Rainforest API cost per month? On monthly billing, Hobbyist is 23 USD for 500 credits, Starter 83 USD for 10,000, Production 375 USD for 250,000, BigData 1,000 USD for 1,000,000, ScaleUp 2,200 USD for 2,500,000, Platform 4,000 USD for 5,000,000 and Volume 9,000 USD for 20,000,000. Yearly billing takes 20 percent off each.
How many credits does a Rainforest API request use? One for a standard product, search or category request. Variant prices, import delivery, summarization attributes, image block videos and a fresh GTIN lookup each make it 2 credits, and safety product resources make it 3. Check the parameters you send before estimating a budget.
What happens when I run out of Rainforest API credits? You keep going at the plan's overage rate, from 0.06 USD a credit on Hobbyist to 0.0009 on Volume. On Production and above that is double the in plan rate, so a month of overage can cost more than moving up a plan.
Is there a free Rainforest API plan? No ongoing free plan is listed. There is a free trial at signup, and the smallest paid plan is Hobbyist at 23 USD a month, or about 18 USD a month on yearly billing, for 500 credits.
Is Rainforest API cheaper than a scraping API? Below about 500 products a month, yes. Above roughly 35,000 lookups a month, a flat rate scraping API usually costs less, by up to six times on the budgets above, in exchange for naming the fields yourself instead of getting a ready Amazon schema.
Does Rainforest API work for Walmart or Target? No, Rainforest is Amazon only. Traject Data sells separate APIs for some other retailers, each with its own plans. A general scraping API covers any public store on one key and one plan.