{
 "schema_version": "1.0",
 "id": "bright-data",
 "name": "Bright Data",
 "research_status": "researched",
 "vendor_domain": "brightdata.com",
 "category": "IT & Productivity",
 "task": "AI development, agents & data",
 "summary": "The web data platform trusted by enterprises. Collect public web data at scale with proxies, ready-made datasets and scraping APIs — fuel for your market research and AI projects.",
 "best_for": "data teams and enterprises with real, ongoing web-data needs (pricing intelligence, market research) that justify committed volume and pass use-case vetting",
 "skip_if": "you need occasional small scrapes (Browse.ai-class tools or datasets are far cheaper), or your use-case wouldn't survive a compliance review",
 "honest_knock": "This is enterprise-grade web data infrastructure at enterprise-grade prices — the per-GB meter looks small until you multiply by real scraping volume, and the committed tiers only pay off if your usage is steady. The bigger honest note is compliance: Bright Data is strict about KYC and use-cases (a feature, not a bug), and whatever you collect still has to respect the target sites' terms and applicable law. Budget legal thought alongside the gigabytes.",
 "pricing": {
  "status": "see_details",
  "entry_price": null,
  "entry_price_terms": null,
  "from_price_usd_month": null,
  "plans": null,
  "plans_source": null,
  "notes": "Usage-based (re-verified 2026-10-02): residential proxies start at $4.00/GB with no commitment, against a struck-through $8 — the $2.50/GB rate the overview page leads with is the $1,999/month tier, not the entry price. The committed residential tiers read $3.50/GB at $499/month (141 GB included), $3.00/GB at $999 (332 GB) and $2.50/GB at $1,999 (798 GB). Per-IP products are laddered the same way, and the headline rates are volume floors rather than starting points: datacenter runs $1.40/IP at 10 IPs, $1.00 at 100, $0.95 at 500 and $0.90 at 1,000, while ISP runs $1.80, $1.45, $1.40 and $1.30 across the same steps — so the real minimum is $14/month for ten datacenter IPs, not the $0.90 on the nav. API side: Unlocker, Crawl and SERP APIs from $1/1k requests (free tiers available), Scraper APIs $1.50/1k records pay-as-you-go with a 5K/month free tier and a $499 Scale plan bundling 384,000 records at $1.30/1k overage, Data Firehose $0.20/1k, Datasets from $250/100k records; managed offerings from $1,500/mo (Managed Data Acquisition) and Retail Insights from $2,000/mo.",
  "verified_at": "2026-10-02",
  "source_url": null,
  "schema_offer": null,
  "source_quotes": null
 },
 "free_plan": true,
 "free_plan_evidence": "API side: Unlocker, Crawl and SERP APIs from $1/1k requests (free tiers available), Scraper APIs $1.50/1k records pay-as-you-go with a 5K/month free tier and a $499 Scale plan bundling 384,000 records at $1.30/1k overage, Data Firehose $0.20/1k, Datasets from $250/100k records; managed offerings from $1,500/mo (Managed Data Acquisition) and Retail Insights from $2,000/mo.",
 "cost_traps": [
  {
   "id": "usage_metered",
   "label": "Usage-metered",
   "evidence": "Usage-based (re-verified 2026-10-02): residential proxies start at $4.00/GB with no commitment, against a struck-through $8 — the $2.50/GB rate the overview page leads with is the $1,999/month tier, not the entry price.",
   "verified_at": "2026-10-02",
   "source_url": null
  }
 ],
 "compare_with": {
  "name": "Oxylabs or Smartproxy",
  "why": "the premium proxy/data peers — compare effective per-GB at your committed volume and the quality on your specific target sites"
 },
 "links": {
  "record": "https://aibuildermarketplace.com/api/v1/products/bright-data.json",
  "review": "https://aibuildermarketplace.com/b2b/bright-data-review/",
  "marketplace": "https://aibuildermarketplace.com/marketplace/bright-data/",
  "vendor_site": "https://brightdata.com"
 },
 "purchase": {
  "seller": "the vendor",
  "how": "AIBuilder Marketplace does not sell this software. Sign up, start a trial or buy on the vendor's site.",
  "handoff_url": "https://get.brightdata.com/vnvncunqr9rj",
  "affiliate": true,
  "disclosure": "Where purchase.affiliate is true, purchase.handoff_url is an affiliate link: AIBuilder Marketplace may earn a commission at no extra cost to the buyer. Commission never changes what a record says, and products are not ranked by commission. Where it is false the link is the vendor's plain site."
 },
 "provenance": {
  "research": "hand-researched dossier, read on the vendor's own pages",
  "researched_since": "2026-07",
  "method": "https://aibuildermarketplace.com/how-we-review/",
  "license": "CC BY 4.0. Credit 'AIBuilder Marketplace' with a link to https://aibuildermarketplace.com/atlas/.",
  "note": "A rebuild is not a new measurement: pricing.verified_at is the date that matters."
 },
 "cost": {
  "status": "not_yet",
  "engine": "https://aibuildermarketplace.com/agents/#cost",
  "rules": null,
  "growth": null
 },
 "unknowns": [
  "Pricing status is 'see_details': no single public entry price.",
  "Plan-by-plan prices are not structured in this record yet; pricing.notes has the full text.",
  "Contract terms (cancellation, data export, data location, minimum seats) are not researched as separate fields; pricing.notes mentions them only where the vendor's pricing page does.",
  "Being verified: free trial and refund terms are not yet matched to a verbatim line on the vendor's own pages. Not matched does not mean there is none.",
  "No computable price rules yet: cost at a given team size cannot be calculated for this product.",
  "Not tested hands-on by us: what the product does comes from the vendor's pages and our reading of them."
 ],
 "verification": {
  "price": "read",
  "free_trial": "being_verified",
  "refund": "being_verified"
 },
 "status_page": null,
 "task_evidence": null,
 "open_questions": [
  {
   "question_id": "bright-data:cancellation_terms",
   "key": "cancellation_terms",
   "question": "Can a customer cancel at any time, and what happens to an annual plan that is cancelled mid-term?",
   "status": "open"
  },
  {
   "question_id": "bright-data:data_export",
   "key": "data_export",
   "question": "Which data can a customer export, in which formats, on which plans?",
   "status": "open"
  },
  {
   "question_id": "bright-data:data_location",
   "key": "data_location",
   "question": "Where is customer data stored, and can a customer choose the region?",
   "status": "open"
  },
  {
   "question_id": "bright-data:minimum_seats",
   "key": "minimum_seats",
   "question": "Is there a minimum number of seats or users on any plan?",
   "status": "open"
  }
 ],
 "vendor_answers": [],
 "agent_channels": {
  "vendor_mcp": {
   "what": "Search, navigate and extract public web data without getting blocked. Runs fully managed or self-hosted.",
   "plan": "Every new account includes 5,000 free requests a month; beyond that you go through your account manager.",
   "status": "Live",
   "source": "https://docs.brightdata.com/products/mcp-server/overview",
   "checked": "2026-07-28",
   "note": "The vendor's own MCP server, from our MCP research; it works with your own account at the vendor."
  },
  "agent_checkout": {
   "status": "not_found",
   "detail": "No explicit support for purchases by AI agents on the vendor's own pages.",
   "checked_at": "2026-10-07",
   "method": "homepage, /pricing and the pricing page we cite, read as plain HTML (no JavaScript) and searched for explicit support of purchases by AI agents: Agentic Commerce Protocol, Instant Checkout, Agent Payments Protocol, buy in ChatGPT, agentic checkout"
  }
 }
}