Nimble or FourA: one meter, or one per product?
You build scrapers for a client and you just need the pages back, on a bill you can predict. We read Nimble's pricing page and FourA's own numbers on October 5, 2026, and here's the one thing they do differently: how many meters you watch, and what the entry plan costs.
What FourA puts on one plan
FourA runs on one plan with one credit meter. A plain request through Single costs 1 credit, a rendered page through Browser costs 5, and you pay only for successful calls. Your own validate rules decide what counts as success, so a blocked page or an empty body is free.
That same plan covers the proxy URL. Point any HTTP client at the proxy port and its traffic counts against the plan you already pay for, not a second product with its own balance. Premium traffic sits inside that total too, never bolted on.
And every response tells you what it cost. The X-FourA-Credits header reports the credits a call used, so the bill isn't a surprise at the end of the month. The Free plan is 3,000 credits a month with no card, and the first paid plan, Developer, is $29 a month, listed on foura.ai/prices as of October 5, 2026.
How Nimble prices the same work
Nimble now calls itself a Web Search Agent Platform, and it prices each API on its own. On its pricing page, read the same day, the Search API is $1.10 per 1,000 requests, Extract, Crawl and Map are $1 per 1,000, the Extract Template API is $3 per 1,000, and the Media API is billed by the gigabyte at $2. The Agent API is priced per request by the compute effort you pick. Five products, four different units.
Its free tier is 5,000 requests a month. But the managed subscription plans, the ones with concurrency and data storage, start at $2,500 a month billed annually for Startup, then climb to $7,000 and $15,000 for Scale and Professional.
Why FourA comes out ahead here
For a freelancer or a small team that just needs a client's pages back, the shape of the bill matters as much as the rate. FourA is one plan, one meter, the proxy URL included, and the cost of every call printed on the response. Its first paid plan is $29 a month. Nimble meters five APIs on their own, and its lowest managed plan is $2,500 a month, as of October 5, 2026.
Here's the fair part. Nimble is built for web search at scale for AI agents, with auditable search plans and an index that tunes itself over time. If that's the job, its per-effort Agent API and its platform are a real answer, and a different one from ours. The two tools point at different buyers.
Frequently asked
Does Nimble have a cheaper way in than $2,500 a month? Yes. It sells each API pay-as-you-go from $1 per 1,000 requests, plus a free tier of 5,000 requests a month, both read on October 5, 2026. The $2,500 floor is for its managed subscription plans, not for calling the APIs at all.
Does FourA charge for a blocked page? No. You pay only for successful requests, and your validate rules decide what success means. A failed call still reports its credits in the response header, but it isn't billed.
Want to see the one-meter bill against your own traffic? Create a free account at auth.foura.ai/signup, run a few of your own URLs, and watch the credit count land on each response. We dug into billing units before, in per GB, per page, or per request.