I have an Ancestry account which is £19 per month, more or less, and I can trawl through all the records they have here or around the world for that, at my leisure as many times as I like, downloading whatever files I need, discarding, duplicating, etc to my heart's content. I cannot see that it is cheaper in Scotland, or as easy.
Firstly, ScotlandsPeople advertises a "free search", but all it really seems to do is let you type in a name and then it says "we have X number of birth data, X number of census data" etc "with that name". You then have to register with the site and buy credits. 30 credits cost £7.
For every page of 25 results in an index search (in the parish registers, census registers, Catholic parish registers and statutory registers) you are charged one credit. Therefore, you essentially would have to know a lot of stuff before you search to avoid losing loads of credits searching through the information displayed. Each record you decide to open to view the scanned image costs you 5 credits. The website says that this means reading one index page and opening one of the resulting documents would cost a minimum of £1.40.
Searching the list of wills and testaments is free, but each document you download costs 10 credits, which the site says would cost about £2.33. Searching coats of arms is free, but each document download costs £10.
I am pretty quick on Ancestry now, and I can easily attach several items in ten minutes to a particular person as long as the data makes sense. 7 census reports, a birth, marriage, death and a will can easily be racked up by one person, and when I know their family that is easy to do several times over in an hour. If all my relatives were in Scotland, or I had done my current research at the rates ScotlandsPeople charge, I would be spending £100s in a month!
To order a copy of a birth certificate for my great-grandad, which I think is my best way forward, I either have to send by post or fax a form SU3 here
http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/files2/f ... ds/su3.pdf to the Scottish General Records Office. I could telephone in the details too. I have to say that this was not very clearly explained on the website, and I really had to hunt around for it.
http://www.gro-scotland.gov.uk/files2/f ... let-s2.pdf gives the charges - it costs £15 for an "extract" (which is actually the full birth certificate) without going for the priority service - it would be £9.25 in England or Wales.
So no, it doesn't seem to be any cheaper, in fact a heck of a lot more expensive than searching in England or Wales.