PhantomBuster Pricing in 2026: Execution Time vs Per-Lead — What Google Maps Scraping Really Costs

$0.08 per lead. That's what PhantomBuster actually costs you when you do the math on their entry plan.

Sounds reasonable? Hold that thought.

We ran the same extraction on Scrap.io. Same target, same volume. Cost per lead: $0.0035. That's not a typo, it's roughly 23 times cheaper. And we didn't have to sit there watching a progress bar eat through our monthly execution time while praying the script wouldn't crash halfway through.

PhantomBuster is a solid automation platform. Great for LinkedIn. Decent for social media scraping. But when it comes to Google Maps scraping cost, its execution-time pricing model turns what should be a simple data extraction into an expensive guessing game. You're paying for minutes, not results. And if your phantom fails? Those minutes are gone. Poof.

This article breaks down the real phantombuster pricing in 2026, calculates actual cost-per-lead numbers that nobody else is publishing, and shows you exactly why per-lead pricing models exist, and who saves the most by switching.

PhantomBuster Pricing Plans in 2026: What You Actually Pay

Let's start with the numbers straight from PhantomBuster's pricing page. The sticker prices look manageable. The math behind them? Not so much.

Start, Grow, and Scale Plans Breakdown

PhantomBuster renamed its plans in 2026. Starter became Start, Pro became Grow, Team became Scale. The monthly prices didn't move, and there's now a 20% discount if you pay annually. (Some people type it as two words, "phantom buster pricing", but it's the same tool.) Here's how much does phantombuster cost across the three tiers (phantombuster.com/pricing, 2026):

That "Est. Google Maps Leads/mo" column is the part nobody advertises. The Grow plan, at 80 hours of execution time, maxes out at roughly 2,400 leads per month for Google Maps extractions. Not 20,000. Not 10,000. Two thousand four hundred.

What "Execution Time" Really Means for Your Budget

Here's the part most people don't grasp until they've already paid. Phantombuster execution time explained in plain English: you're renting compute minutes. Every second your phantom runs, scrolling through Google Maps, loading pages, waiting for data, counts against your monthly allocation. Whether the phantom finds 500 leads or crashes after 3, the time is consumed.

Think of it like a taxi meter running while you're stuck in traffic. You're paying to sit there. Not to arrive.

Once you factor in the failures, the retries, and the second phantom you need just to pull emails, the Start plan works out to roughly $0.08 per lead. The Scale plan brings that down to about $0.049 per lead, but you're paying $439/month to get there. That's the phantombuster pricing reality nobody puts on a comparison chart.

How much does phantombuster cost per month for Google Maps specifically? More than the sticker price. Way more. Because execution time doesn't just cover the extraction, it covers the failures, the retries, and the manual cleanup afterward.

The Hidden Costs of Execution-Time Pricing

Jake ran his PhantomBuster Google Maps phantom for 3 hours last Tuesday. He was extracting restaurant data across Manhattan, a single city. That one run ate a sixth of his monthly Start allocation. And here's the kicker: half the results didn't have email addresses. So he needed a second phantom to crawl those websites for contact info. More time. More money. Same leads.

Jake's story isn't unusual. It's the norm. Over on Capterra, one growth hacker put it plainly in his review: "Any serious scraping duty will require an additional tool and/or additional (paid) credits to enrich the data." Another founder was blunter: "I found it extremely expensive for automation. It is very difficult to make it profitable." These are paying users, not competitors.

Failed Extractions Still Cost You

Your phantom crashes at the 45-minute mark because Google's anti-bot system kicked in. Those 45 minutes? Gone. Your leads? Maybe half-saved in a broken CSV somewhere. Maybe not. But your execution time balance doesn't care about your feelings. It just decreases.

And failed extractions happen all the time with scraping tools that rely on browser automation against Google Maps. The DOM changes. Rate limits hit. CAPTCHAs pop up. Each failure burns time you'll never get back.

Manual Filtering = More Time = More Money

Here's what drives me nuts about execution time pricing vs per result scraping. With PhantomBuster, you can't filter results before extraction. You scrape everything, restaurants with no website, businesses permanently closed, listings with zero reviews, and then you manually clean the spreadsheet afterward.

That filtering time isn't free. If you're paying someone $25/hour to clean data, and it takes 2 hours to filter 1,000 leads down to 400 usable ones, you just added $50 to your lead cost. Those phantombuster hidden costs never show up on the pricing page.

The Email Address Problem

Emails. Everybody wants them. PhantomBuster's basic Google Maps phantom doesn't extract them. You need a second phantom, "Google Maps Search to Contact Data", which requires two slots and more execution time. On the Start plan with 5 slots, that second phantom takes up 40% of your capacity just to get email addresses that should've been included in the first place.

And even then, the emails you get aren't classified. Is it a sales@ address? An info@ inbox that nobody checks? The owner's personal email? You have no idea. You're blind-sending and hoping for the best. (Spoiler: that's not a strategy. That's gambling.)

Per-Lead Pricing: How It Works (and Why It Saves You Money)

What if you could see exactly how many leads you'll get, and the exact price, before clicking "export"?

That's not a hypothetical. That's how per-lead pricing works.

Know Your Costs Before You Extract

With a pay per lead Google Maps scraper like Scrap.io, the model is dead simple: 10,000 leads per month for $35 on the Basic plan. That's $0.0035 per lead (scrap.io/pricing, 2026). No execution time. No surprise bills. No phantom crashes eating your budget.

You type "restaurants" + "New York." The platform tells you: 8,970 results available right now (Scrap.io, 2026). You decide how many to export. You pay for exactly that number. Done.

And here's something people overlook. Re-exporting the same lead within 30 days costs zero additional credits. Updated your filters? Want a fresh CSV? Go ahead. No extra charge. Try that with PhantomBuster's execution time model.

Pre-Extraction Filtering: Pay Only for Qualified Leads

This is where the google maps scraper cost per lead gap gets absurd. Scrap.io applies filters before credits are consumed. Want only businesses with an email address? Toggle the filter. Only mobile phone numbers for SMS campaigns? Done. Minimum 3.5-star rating? Two clicks.

Back to that New York restaurant search. Filter for an email present plus a rating of 3.5 or higher, and those 8,970 listings drop to 3,048 qualified restaurants (Scrap.io, 2026). You only pay for those 3,048. On PhantomBuster you'd have scraped all 8,970, burned the execution time, then deleted two-thirds of them by hand.

You're not paying for garbage data you'll delete later. You're paying for leads you'll actually use. That's not a minor difference. That's the entire point.

For a deep dive on how these filters work, check out the filtering guide for Google Maps scraping. And if the runtime meter is what's bleeding you dry, the lead generation cost breakdown shows exactly where a flat per-lead model wins.

Real Cost Comparison: PhantomBuster vs Scrap.io for 10,000 Leads

For 10,000 qualified Google Maps leads with email addresses: PhantomBuster costs roughly $800. Scrap.io costs $35.

Read that again.

Scenario 1: 1,000 Restaurant Leads in New York

Let's make this concrete. You need 1,000 restaurant leads in New York City with email addresses, phone numbers, and at least a 3.5-star rating.

PhantomBuster route: Run the Google Maps Search phantom (~2 hours of execution time). Get raw listings, no emails. Run a second phantom to scrape websites for contact info (~1.5 hours). Manually filter out listings below 3.5 stars. Manually remove duplicates. Total execution time: ~3.5 hours. On the Start plan, that's nearly a fifth of your monthly allocation. And you've got 1,000 leads, probably 600 usable ones after cleanup.

Scrap.io route: Search "Restaurant" + "New York." Apply filters: email present, rating ≥ 3.5. The count drops from 8,970 to 3,048 qualified restaurants before you spend a cent. Export 1,000 of them. Time: about 3 minutes. Cost: 1,000 credits out of your 10,000 monthly. All leads have emails. All filtered. Zero cleanup.

Bref. It's not even close.

Scenario 2: 10,000 Leads Across a Country

Now scale that up. An agency managing clients in the US needs 10,000 leads monthly, plumbers, dentists, restaurants, whatever the client needs.

On PhantomBuster, extracting at country scale is... well, it's practically impossible. Google Maps caps results at 120 per search. You'd need to run separate phantoms for every single city. That's hundreds of individual runs. The Grow plan's 80 hours of execution time? Burned through in a week. You'd need the Scale plan at $439/month, and even then, the logistics are a nightmare.

On Scrap.io, you search at country level. Literally "Plumber" + "United States", and export. One search. Two clicks. Right now that pulls 76,249 plumbers across the US (Scrap.io, 2026), no city-by-city grind. Scrap.io has indexed 225,676,406 establishments across 195 countries (Scrap.io, 2026), and the 120-result cap doesn't apply because it built its own index.

And the real case data backs this up: 11,734 businesses extracted in 45 minutes on Scrap.io, a documented client result. One client pulled every restaurant in France, all 222,072 of them (Scrap.io, 2026), in a single export. Two clicks. On PhantomBuster, with 34,955 French municipalities and a 120-result cap, you'd need tens of thousands of city-level searches to cover the same territory. Try doing that. I'll wait.

Cost-Per-Lead Calculator

Here's the phantombuster vs scrap.io pricing comparison at different volumes. These numbers account for execution time, cleanup, and the email extraction overhead on PB:

The pattern is clear: the more leads you need, the worse execution-time pricing gets. (And yes, those PB numbers assume everything goes smoothly. Real-world costs are often higher.)

Curious about how to reduce google maps scraping costs? The answer isn't finding tricks within PhantomBuster. It's switching to a model where you pay for outcomes, not runtime.

Beyond Pricing: What You Get for Your Money

Price is one thing. But what about the data you actually receive?

Because here's the dirty secret of google maps data extraction pricing comparison: cheap data that's missing half the fields is more expensive than slightly pricier data that's complete. You end up paying for enrichment tools, manual research, or, worst case, sending cold emails to dead addresses. That costs you deliverability, sender reputation, and actual revenue.

Data Columns: PhantomBuster (15) vs Scrap.io (70+)

PhantomBuster's Google Maps export gives you about 15 columns: name, address, rating, reviews, category, website, phone, coordinates, hours, and a few more. Functional. Basic.

Scrap.io exports 70+ columns. Everything PhantomBuster gives you, plus: classified emails (up to 5 per business), social media URLs (Facebook, Instagram, LinkedIn, TikTok, YouTube, X/Twitter), website technologies and CMS detection, ad pixels, meta descriptions, contact pages, and more. All of this comes from crawling both the Google Maps listing and the business website in a single extraction.

If you're running cold email campaigns, this data gap matters more than the price gap. Sending to unclassified, unverified emails is basically throwing money into a furnace.

Email Classification & Phone Type Detection

Scrap.io doesn't just find emails, it classifies them. Each address is tagged as: individual (with first and last name extracted), contact (info@, hello@), sales, marketing, finance, or admin. You know exactly who you're reaching before you hit send.

Phone numbers get the same treatment. Every number is classified as fixed, mobile, or special, critical if you're running SMS campaigns where you can only text mobile numbers. (PhantomBuster gives you a phone number. Just... a number. No classification. Good luck figuring out if it's a fax line.)

Want the full picture on email extraction? Read the guide on how to find email addresses from Google Maps.

How Other Google Maps Scrapers Compare on Price

PhantomBuster isn't even the most expensive option. But it might be the worst value for Google Maps specifically.

If you're searching for the best google maps scraper or a reliable phantombuster alternative, pricing model matters more than feature lists. Here's how the market looks when you compare the google maps scraping cost for 10,000 leads with email enrichment across tools. And look, we're biased, obviously. We built Scrap.io. But these numbers are from public pricing pages. Check them yourself.

Quick Pricing Table (Outscraper, Apify, IBLead, Scrap.io)

Outscraper charges about $3 per 1,000 basic results, dropping to $1 per 1,000 at high volume, plus an email enrichment add-on (outscraper.com, 2026). Competitive, but no real pre-extraction filtering, you pay for everything, then sort through it. Apify is developer-focused and cheaper on compute, but requires technical setup and bills by machine time, not results. IBLead is affordable but limited in features.

For context, even the Google Places API costs roughly $32 per 1,000 requests for basic Nearby Search data (Google Cloud, 2026), and that's without emails, social links, or phone classification. Run the numbers yourself with the Google Maps API cost calculator. If you want the full ranked field, we tested the 10 best Google Maps scrapers head to head.

Oh, and one more data point. A poll on Reddit's r/Botdog community showed PhantomBuster getting only 19% of votes when users were asked about their preferred scraping tool. The rest went to specialized alternatives. Users on Capterra frequently mention execution time consumption as a major frustration, especially for Google Maps use cases where the per-minute model feels punitive.

Want a dedicated phantombuster alternative comparison? We wrote a full breakdown: PhantomBuster alternative for Google Maps.

Is Google Maps Scraping Legal?

Before you worry about costs, is this even legal?

Short answer: yes, for public business data. Business names, phone numbers, addresses, ratings, all fair game, because they're published on public listings with no login required.

The landmark hiQ Labs v. LinkedIn case (9th Circuit, 2022) established that scraping publicly available data doesn't violate the Computer Fraud and Abuse Act. GDPR in Europe treats B2B data under "legitimate interest" (Article 6), and the CCPA in California explicitly carves out publicly available business information.

Scrap.io is GDPR and CCPA compliant, extracting only publicly available business data that companies themselves published on their Google Maps listings and websites. Every data point is traceable to its source. No shady databases. No personal data scraping.

For a full legal analysis with the case law spelled out, read is it legal to scrape Google Maps. And if you want the wider technical picture, the comprehensive guide to Google Maps scraping covers US, EU, and international frameworks.

FAQ

How much does PhantomBuster cost per month in 2026?

PhantomBuster pricing ranges from $69/month (Start) to $439/month (Scale), with a 20% discount on annual billing. But the real cost depends on execution time consumption. For Google Maps scraping specifically, expect to pay $0.05–$0.08 per lead once you factor in failed extractions, dual-phantom email enrichment, and manual data cleanup. The advertised price is just the starting point.

What is execution-time pricing and why is it problematic?

Execution-time pricing charges you for how long your scripts run, regardless of results. A phantom that runs for 2 hours and crashes? You still paid for 2 hours. A scrape that returns 80% junk data? Same price as one that returns 100% qualified leads. It's problematic because your costs become unpredictable and you're incentivized to rush extractions (lower quality) to save time (money).

How much does Google Maps scraping cost per lead?

It varies wildly. PhantomBuster: ~$0.05–$0.08/lead. Outscraper: ~$0.014/lead with email. Scrap.io: $0.0035/lead on the Basic plan ($35/month for 10,000 credits). The cheapest google maps scraping tool 2026 depends on volume, but per-lead models consistently beat time-based pricing at scale. Plug your own numbers into a scraping tool cost calculator google maps and the gap only widens.

Can I scrape Google Maps for free?

Partially. PhantomBuster's 2026 free trial runs 14 days with no credit card required, but it's tight: 2 hours of execution time, 5 slots, and exports capped at 10 rows. Enough to click around, not enough to build a list. So phantombuster free plan limitations google maps are real. Scrap.io's free trial gives you 7 days and 100 export credits with full access to all filters and features (a credit card is required to activate). Different trade-off: PhantomBuster skips the card, Scrap.io gives you far more usable data to actually test.

Is Scrap.io a good PhantomBuster alternative for Google Maps?

If your use case is Google Maps lead generation, yes. Scrap.io is purpose-built for it: 225 million+ establishments indexed, 195 countries, 70+ data columns, email classification, phone type detection, and pre-extraction filtering. PhantomBuster is a generalist automation platform that happens to have a Google Maps phantom. For LinkedIn automation? PB wins. For Google Maps data at scale? Is phantombuster worth it for google maps? Not when a specialized tool costs about 20 times less per lead and pulls an entire country in two clicks.

Conclusion

Look. PhantomBuster is a great tool. For LinkedIn. For Twitter. For multi-platform automation. Nobody's disputing that.

But for Google Maps? Paying per minute when you could be paying per lead is like buying water by the hour at a restaurant. It doesn't make sense. You don't want minutes. You want data.

The numbers don't lie. At $0.0035 per lead versus $0.08 per lead, the math does itself. And when you add pre-extraction filtering (3,048 qualified restaurants out of 8,970 in New York), email classification, phone type detection, and country-level extraction in two clicks (76,249 US plumbers, 222,072 French restaurants), the per-lead model wins going away.