Firecrawl
Verified Oct 2, 2026 ActiveWeb data API that searches, scrapes, crawls and interacts with sites, returning clean Markdown or JSON for LLM pipelines.
Listed on EffectHub ·
Pricing
- Pricing model
- Freemium
- Paid options from
- $16/mo
- Billing
- Monthly
Credit-based: 1 credit is one scraped page, search costs 2 credits per 10 results. Free gives 1,000 credits a month; Hobby is $16/month billed yearly ($19 billed monthly) for 5,000 credits, then Standard $83, Growth $333 and Scale $599 per month on annual billing.
Use tool ↗About Firecrawl
Firecrawl is an API for getting web content into a shape language models can use. You send a URL or a search query and get back Markdown, structured JSON or a screenshot, with endpoints for scraping a page, crawling a whole site, mapping its links, searching the web, and driving a page with prompts. SDKs cover Python and Node, and it connects to agent tools through MCP and a CLI. The core is open source under AGPL-3.0 and can be self-hosted, with a hosted service billed in credits.
- Platforms
- Web · API
- API
- Yes
- Last verified
- Oct 2, 2026
Verified sources
- Plans, credit costs per endpoint and free tier (Hobby $19 monthly or $16 annual)firecrawl.dev ↗
- Product description: web data API to search, scrape and interact; open source; foundersfirecrawl.dev ↗
- Operating entity is SideGuide Technologies, Inc. d/b/a Firecrawl, a Delaware corporationfirecrawl.dev ↗
- Open-source repository under AGPL-3.0, created April 2024github.com ↗
Is Firecrawl legit?
We don’t label tools safe or unsafe. Below are the records we checked ourselves, each with the date we read it.
- Last checked
- Oct 2, 2026The site answered
- On the market since
- 2024The vendor's own material, read by us
- Operated by
- SideGuide Technologies, Inc. (d/b/a Firecrawl), United StatesOur research, card verified Oct 2, 2026
Pros & cons of Firecrawl
Firecrawl is a sensible default when an agent or RAG pipeline needs readable page content and you would rather not run proxies and headless browsers yourself. The credit model is simple to reason about for plain scrapes, but extra formats and browser sessions cost more credits than the headline page count suggests.
Pros
- One API covers search, scrape, crawl, map and page interaction
- Free tier renews every month and needs no card
- Open-source core with SDKs, an MCP server and a CLI for agent tools
- Failed scrapes that return nothing are not charged
Cons
- JSON, question and highlight formats add 4 credits per page, so structured extraction costs several times a plain scrape
- Pages that return an error status such as 403 or 404 still cost a credit
- Headline plan prices are annual; paying monthly is higher
Best for
- Developers feeding site content into RAG or agent pipelines
- Teams that want a hosted scraper but keep the option to self-host the open-source core
- Prototypes that fit inside the free monthly credits
Not for
- Non-technical users who want a point-and-click scraper with spreadsheets as output
- Companies that cannot accept AGPL-licensed code in a self-hosted setup
Watch out: The quoted per-month prices are for annual billing, and the pricing page notes new rates effective September 4, 2026. Check the credit cost of the output formats you need before sizing a plan.
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