Your search sets the size of the job
A scrape of one business type in one city (up to about 120 businesses) is a small job by any measure. A dozen business types across every city in a state is a large one, many times bigger. That gap is the one you'd expect between looking up one thing and looking up ten thousand. Your query sets the size of the job. Every plan, Enterprise included, runs one scrape at a time; what a bigger plan adds is credits.
Three things decide how big a scrape is
Search breadth
How many business types, multiplied by how many cities or states, you ask Maps Harvest to cover. "Plumbers in Dallas" is one search. "Plumbers, electricians and HVAC contractors across every city in Texas" is hundreds. You control this one directly, and it grows the job more than anything else.
Where you tell it to stop
Max total results stops a search at exactly that many leads, so a job you cap at 500 ends there instead of working through every city on the list. A search also stops when the account runs out of credits, and you can continue it later from the last finished city.
How many businesses each place has
Google Maps shows up to about 120 results for one search in one city. A big city can fill that for a common business type; a small town may have a handful. Nobody knows the number before the search runs, which is why no honest answer to "how long will my scrape take" is a single number.
Plan tier isn't on that list. Every plan, from Free to Enterprise, runs one scrape at a time. If your real job is a 10,000-business, multi-state pull, the levers are the size of the search and where you tell it to stop. You can also stop a scrape at any point, download what it has collected so far, and continue later from the last finished city.
Filters decide which leads you pay for
It's fair to assume a minimum-rating or has-website filter would make a scrape faster, since the final list is smaller. It doesn't, and the reason matters before you plan around it.
Filters run during the scrape. That's what makes them useful: you're only charged credits for businesses that match, instead of paying for everything and deleting rows yourself. But Maps Harvest still searches every place you asked for, and the filter only decides what goes into your file. A search for restaurants in Texas with a 4.0 minimum rating and no website covers exactly as much of Texas as the same search with no filters. It hands back a shorter list at the end.
That's a good trade: you don't pay for leads you'd throw away, and you don't filter a spreadsheet afterwards. If time is the concern, the levers are search breadth and Max total results, covered above.
Size your own scrape in three steps
There's no number to look up, so size your own job against the things that move it:
- Count searches before you count leads. Restaurants in 5 cities is 5 searches. Add cafes and it's 10. Add 20 more cities and it's 50. That number (business types × places) is what grows the job.
- Decide where it should stop. If you only need a set number of leads, set Max total results and the search stops at exactly that many. If your search count runs into the hundreds (a real multi-state, multi-category pull), you don't have to wait for all of it: stop when you have enough, download, and continue later from the last finished city.
- Check your credits before you start. 1 credit is 1 lead, and a search never collects more leads than the account has credits. If it runs out, it stops, and you can continue it after an upgrade or, on a paid plan, a top-up.
Which plan fits which size of list
Free / Starter
A first test or a one-off pull: one business type, a handful of cities. Free gives 50 credits once; Starter ($19/mo) gives 1,000 credits a month.
Growth ($49/mo)
Repeat, mid-size pulls (5,000 credits a month) that you start from the dashboard or from the REST API, which every plan includes, often on a schedule you run yourself (a cron job or a Zapier schedule trigger). Webhooks, from Growth up, send the leads on automatically when a search finishes, so you aren't refreshing the dashboard to see if it's done.
Scale ($129/mo)
Large pulls (a full state, several business types) with 20,000 credits a month, plus scheduled recurring scrapes. The extra credits buy a bigger list; Scale still runs one scrape at a time, like every plan.
Enterprise ($250+/mo)
Heavy, ongoing volume with 50,000 to 500,000 credits a month, plus a local worker CLI.
FAQ
Can Maps Harvest tell me how long my search will take?+
No. The size of the job comes from your search: how many business types and how many places. What you can set before you start is where it stops. Max total results ends the search at exactly that many leads, and a search never collects more leads than you have credits.
Do filters make a scrape finish faster?+
No. Filters (minimum rating, minimum and maximum reviews, has website, has phone) decide which businesses end up in your file and what you pay for. They don't shrink the search you asked for. A search for restaurants in Texas covers the same cities whether you filter hard or not; the filters decide which results are saved and charged.
Can I run more than one scrape at the same time?+
No. Every plan, Enterprise included, runs one scrape at a time. You can stop a scrape at any point, download what it has collected, and continue later from the last finished city; finished cities aren't searched or charged again.
What's the single biggest lever I control?+
Search breadth: how many business types times how many cities or states you ask for. Double the list of places and you roughly double the work, whatever plan you're on.
Try a small search first
Run one business type in one city and see the size of the job before you plan a bigger one.