Caching

The shared cache lets a repeated scrape skip fetching and rendering entirely: the response comes back faster and costs about half the normal credits. Only successful HTTP 200 responses are ever stored.

Enabling the cache

{
  "url": "https://example.com/pricing",
  "cache": {
    "enabled": true,
    "strategy": "prefer_cache",
    "maxAgeSeconds": 3600,
    "shareScope": "organization"
  }
}

Field (cache.*)	Type	Example	Description
enabled	boolean	true	Turn cache lookup/write on or off for this request.
strategy	string	prefer_cache	prefer_cache, fresh or stale_while_revalidate (below).
maxAgeSeconds	number	3600	Oldest acceptable cache entry age; older entries are treated as a miss.
shareScope	string	organization	Who may reuse the entry: private, organization or global.

Strategies

strategy	Behaviour
prefer_cache (default)	Serve a fresh-enough cached entry if one exists; otherwise scrape and store.
fresh	Bypass the cache, always scrape, then update the entry.
stale_while_revalidate	Accepted, but behaves like prefer_cache: an expired entry is never served stale.

Share scope

shareScope	Who can reuse the entry
private	Only your own identical requests.
organization	Anyone in your workspace.
global	Any ScrapeIt tenant (only anonymous, non-personalized pages should use this).

Reading the cache decision

Every response reports what the cache did in request_metadata.cache_status:

{ "request_metadata": { "cache_status": "hit" } }

hit means the page came from cache; miss (or bypass) means it was scraped fresh.

What a cache hit costs

A cache hit is charged at half price, rounded up: ceil(credits / 2). So a 4-credit fetch is 2 on a hit, a 30-credit render is 15 and a 15-credit residential fetch is 8 (ceil of 7.5). You still pay a little because the platform served and metered a result - but never the full render/proxy cost. The "normal cost" is what the cached request was actually charged: a hit on a page that a proxyType: "auto" request got from a datacenter exit costs half the datacenter price, not half the dearest tier the balance check reserved.

Normal cost	Cache-hit cost
4 (fetch)	2
30 (render)	15
15 (residential fetch)	8
50 (residential render)	25

Good candidates for caching

• Reference pages that change slowly (pricing, docs, catalogs) with a generous maxAgeSeconds.
• High-fan-out workloads where many jobs hit the same URLs - set shareScope: organization.
• Development and testing, so you are not re-charged full price while iterating.

Avoid caching personalized or rapidly-changing pages, or use strategy: fresh for them.

Related pages

• Billing & credits - the cache discount among the other prices.
• Request cost - the price list.