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Firecrawl pricing, price hikes and cheaper alternatives

Firecrawl (firecrawl.dev) is a web scraping tool. Credit-based: each plan includes a monthly pool of credits (1 per scraped page, 2 per 10 search results, 2 per code-driven browser minute), with extra credits sold in $5 blocks on paid plans.. Free plan: 1,000 credits and 500 searches per month with no card needed; pay-as-you-go is not available on free..

What Firecrawl costs

  • 10k pages: $44/mo (10,000 pages x 1 credit = 10,000 credits. Hobby $19/mo includes 5,000; 5,000 extra at $5 per 1,000 = $25; total $44. Standard shows only annual billing ($83/mo, 100,000 credits), so it costs more.)
  • 5k searches: $44/mo (5,000 searches x 2 credits per 10 results = 10,000 credits. Same build: Hobby $19 + 5,000 extra credits ($25) = $44.)
  • 100 browser hours: $54/mo (100 h = 6,000 min x 2 credits per code-driven minute (prompt-driven runs cost 7/min) = 12,000 credits. Hobby $19 + 7,000 extra credits (7 x $5 = $35) = $54. Hobby allows 5 concurrent browsers; default session TTL is 10 min, no maximum stated.)

Plan compared: Hobby plan at $19/month billed monthly, plus 5,000 extra credits bought at $5 per 1,000. Prices are USD per month on monthly billing for three jobs: scraping 10,000 JavaScript-rendered pages (the headline), running 5,000 web search queries and using 100 hours of cloud browser time, each on the cheapest self-serve plan or pay-as-you-go rate that fully covers it. A product that does not do a job shows no price for it.

What Firecrawl does

Core: URL scraping API, Site crawling, LLM-ready output, AI data extraction.

Important: Anti-bot unblocking (partly), Web search API, Research & answer API, AI browser agents (partly), AI agent integrations, Open source & self-hosting (partly).

Also has: Proxy network (partly), Search engine results (partly), Cloud browsers (partly), Scheduling & change alerts (partly), Exports & integrations (partly), Custom scraper hosting (partly), Compliance & ethical sourcing (partly).

Firecrawl price hikes

  • Firecrawl quietly cut what you get · Sep 7, 2026
    Search now draws from the same credit pool as scraping (2 credits per 10 results), so the same allowance covers fewer pages for users who search. PricingSaaS records no numeric limits before or after.

Cheaper alternatives to Firecrawl

At 10,000 pages scraped a month, Firecrawl costs $44/mo. 1 web scraping tool costs less:

  • Bright Data: $15/mo (Pay as you go: Web Unlocker at $1.5 per 1,000 requests), covers 61% of Firecrawl; missing or partial: URL scraping API (partly), Site crawling (partly), LLM-ready output (partly), AI data extraction (partly), Web search API (partly)

Firecrawl alternatives: 2 web scraping tools compared, at every size.

Other kinds of products that cover part of Firecrawl

  • Perplexity (AI assistants): covers 42% of Firecrawl; missing or partial: URL scraping API, Site crawling, LLM-ready output (partly), AI data extraction (partly), Anti-bot unblocking

Every change we logged

  • Sep 7, 2026 · Free tier cut: Free-plan users can no longer buy extra credits. The top-up feature, formerly auto-reload, is now pay-as-you-go and limited to paid plans.
  • Sep 7, 2026 · Limits cut: Search now draws from the same credit pool as scraping (2 credits per 10 results), so the same allowance covers fewer pages for users who search. PricingSaaS records no numeric limits before or after.

Sources

Pricing page: firecrawl.dev/pricing. Prices last checked Oct 16, 2026. Read from Firecrawl's pricing page (effective Sep 4, 2026), its Interact docs and PricingSaaS. Only Hobby shows a monthly price, so Standard, Growth and Scale appear as annual rates and set no point; the one-credit-per-page rate assumes a basic scrape, and the page does not say whether JavaScript rendering changes it.