Firecrawl: Web Data, Pricing and Evaluation Guide
What does Firecrawl do?
Firecrawl provides search, crawling and page extraction for applications that need web material in formats such as Markdown and JSON.
Who should consider it?
Developers building retrieval pipelines and teams maintaining a bounded collection of public documentation.
How much does it cost?
Free provides 1,000 monthly credits. Hobby is $19 billed monthly or $16 per month billed annually. Basic scraping consumes one credit per page; additional formats and endpoints can change the total. Search and scraping draw on a shared balance. Check the current plan and endpoint table before enabling automatic top-ups.
How can you evaluate it on a small task?
Choose ten public documentation URLs with permission to retrieve them: four ordinary articles, two tables, two pages requiring rendering, one redirect and one missing URL. Define required headings, table cells and canonical URLs before requesting output. Keep the original URL, retrieval time, HTTP status and extracted text together.
What should a useful result pass?
- Compare the extracted table cells with the source, including units and footnotes.
- Keep failed retrievals visible rather than ingesting an error page as documentation.
- Measure credits per accepted document, including retries and extra extraction formats.
- Confirm that navigation and cookie notices do not dominate indexed text.
What are the limits and data considerations?
Clean Markdown does not establish factual accuracy or permission to redistribute the source. Browser actions require separate scope, particularly when credentials or form submissions are involved. Use a narrow allowlist and avoid passing authenticated client material during an initial trial.
Which alternatives should you compare?
Compare Tavily for query-led discovery. For a fixed set of simple pages, a direct HTTP fetch and parser may be easier to maintain; compare completeness and repair effort rather than assuming managed crawling is always necessary.
Sources checked October 23, 2026: Official product website · Plans and pricing · Endpoint documentation.