Firecrawl API review
Best for turning sites into model input
POST /v2/scrape Authorization: Bearer $FIRECRAWL_KEY # 1 credit a page, 2 a search # 10 req/min on Free, 500 on Standard # the real ceiling is concurrent browsers
The Firecrawl API turns any URL into clean Markdown. It runs a real browser, waits for the JavaScript, strips the navigation and the cookie banner, and hands back the content a model can actually read. That is a narrow job and it is one almost every GTM agent needs, because the thing you want to know about an account is usually on the account's own website and nowhere in a database.
Pricing is credits, and the unit is intuitive for once: one credit scrapes one page, two credits run one search. Free gives you 1,000 credits a month with no card. Hobby is $16 a month for 5,000, and Standard jumps to 100,000 for $83, which is a twenty-fold increase in allowance for five times the price.
The thing to understand before you design anything is that the Firecrawl API rate limits are not your bottleneck. Firecrawl says so itself: configured correctly, your real constraint is concurrent browsers, and that number is small.
The rest of the category is in the Sourcing APIs listing. Nothing here is paired against Firecrawl yet, so the compare hub is the place to start.
What each endpoint does, and what it draws
Credits come off one balance whichever endpoint you call. The endpoints differ in what they cost in time and in how hard they are rate limited, which is a different axis from price.
| Endpoint | What it does | Credits | Free plan limit |
|---|---|---|---|
| /scrape | One URL to Markdown. The Firecrawl crawl API's building block. | 1 a page | 10/min |
| /search | The Firecrawl search API: query the web and scrape the results. | 2 a search | 10/min |
| /map | Every URL on a site, fast, before you decide what to scrape. | see docs | 10/min |
| /crawl | Follow a site and scrape what you find. Asynchronous. | 1 a page | 2/min |
| /crawl/status | Poll a running crawl. Deliberately cheap to call. | 0 | 500/min |
| /agent | The Firecrawl deep research API: multi-step gathering. | see docs | 2/min |
| /interact | Drive a page, then read it. For anything behind a click. | more than scrape | 2/min |
| Extract and batch scrape | The Firecrawl extract API and bulk jobs. No keyless access. | varies | key required |
Two patterns save real money. Run /map first and scrape only the pages you want, rather than crawling a site and paying for every page it has. And poll /crawl/status freely, because it is allowed 500 requests a minute on the free plan against 2 for starting a crawl, which tells you exactly how Firecrawl expects you to use it.
Firecrawl's hosted MCP endpoint exposes Search, Scrape and Parse with no key, and the official clients, CLI, SDKs and REST API add Interact keyless. Research, developer and government search endpoints also work without a key on Firecrawl Cloud. Keyless usage is free and capped per IP per day by two separate ceilings, a request count and a credit count, and breaching either returns a 429. Crawl, extract, map and batch scrape always need a key. For a quick agent experiment this means you can be running in under a minute.
Firecrawl API pricing, plan by plan
Firecrawl API pricing is a credit subscription with an unusually steep volume curve. Prices below are the monthly figure when billed yearly, as the pricing page shows them.
Free
- No cost, no card
- 1,000 pages or 500 searches
- 2 concurrent browsers
- Plus the keyless endpoints, which need no account
Hobby
- 2,500 searches or 5,000 pages scraped
- 5 concurrent requests
- $0.0032 a credit
- 1,000 extra credits per $5
Standard
- 50,000 searches or 100,000 pages scraped
- 25 concurrent requests
- $0.00083 a credit, four times better than Hobby
- 2,000 extra credits per $5
Growth
- 50 concurrent requests
- Scale is $599 a month for 1,000,000 credits
- Enterprise above that
The curve between Hobby and Standard is the thing to notice. Five times the price buys twenty times the credits, so the per-credit rate drops from $0.0032 to $0.00083. If you are on Hobby and using more than about a quarter of Standard's allowance, you are paying more for less, and the Firecrawl API cost of the upgrade pays for itself immediately.
Extra credits cost $5 for 1,000 on Hobby and $5 for 2,000 on Standard, which is $0.005 and $0.0025 a credit. Both are more than the plan rate at that tier. Buying top-ups regularly is a signal you are on the wrong plan rather than a way to stay on a cheap one.
Two ceilings, and the one nobody reads is the binding one
Firecrawl API rate limits come in two forms, and Firecrawl is unusually blunt about which one matters: "when configured correctly, your real bottleneck will be concurrent browsers". Requests a minute are there to prevent abuse. Concurrency is what sets your throughput.
| Plan | Concurrent browsers | Max queued jobs | /scrape a minute | /crawl a minute |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | 2 | 50,000 | 10 | 2 |
| Hobby | 5 | 50,000 | 100 | 20 |
| Standard | 25 | 50,000 | 500 | 100 |
| Growth | 50 | 100,000 | 5,000 | 1,000 |
| Scale | 100+ | 200,000+ | 10,000 | 2,000 |
Why concurrency wins
A scrape holds a browser for seconds, not milliseconds.
- Standard allows 500 scrape requests a minute and 25 concurrent browsers.
- If a page takes 3 seconds, 25 browsers deliver about 500 pages a minute, so the two ceilings meet.
- If a page takes 10 seconds, 25 browsers deliver 150 a minute and the request limit never fires.
- Rate limits are per team, so every API key on the account shares one counter.
The queue behind it
Jobs over the concurrency limit wait rather than fail, up to a point.
- Each team has a maximum number of jobs waiting in the concurrency queue.
- Exceeding it returns 429 until existing jobs finish.
- On custom plans the queue is 2,000 times your concurrency limit, capped at 2,000,000.
- Status endpoints are allowed 500 to 500,000 a minute, so polling is not the thing to optimize.
How to create a Firecrawl API key
Getting a Firecrawl API key takes a minute and no payment details: sign up and the key is on the dashboard, with 1,000 credits a month attached. The more interesting question is whether you need one, because several endpoints work without.
With a key
Bearer token, one credential, every endpoint.
- Sent as Authorization: Bearer <key>.
- Required for crawl, extract, map and batch scrape.
- All keys on a team share one rate limit counter and one credit balance.
- The free key is the fastest way to raise the keyless limits, and it costs nothing.
Without a key
Genuinely useful, and genuinely capped.
- The hosted MCP keyless endpoint gives you Search, Scrape and Parse.
- Official clients, CLI, SDKs and REST add Interact.
- Capped per IP per day on both requests and credits; either cap returns a 429.
- Nothing else is available keyless, so a real pipeline needs a key.
Where the Firecrawl API documentation lives
Firecrawl documents on Mintlify, which means the Firecrawl API docs are also readable as plain Markdown: append .md to any page URL and you get the source, which is how an agent should read them.
| Surface | Where | What it answers |
|---|---|---|
| Firecrawl API docs | docs.firecrawl.dev | Every endpoint, with examples in each SDK. |
| Rate limits | docs.firecrawl.dev/rate-limits | Both tables above, plus the keyless rules. |
| llms.txt | docs.firecrawl.dev/llms.txt | The whole index as Markdown, for an agent. |
| Status | firecrawl.betteruptime.com | Whether it is you or them. |
| Source | github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl | It is open source, so you can read or self-host it. |
The repository is worth knowing about even if you never run it. Firecrawl is open source, so the behavior you are paying the hosted service for is inspectable, and self-hosting is a real option if your constraint is data residency rather than engineering time.
Firecrawl also ships an MCP server, and it is on the MCP page with the others in this directory.
Firecrawl's own walkthrough of the API
Firecrawl publishes this on its own channel, so it is Firecrawl's account of Firecrawl, not ours. It is here because a rate card cannot show you the thing moving, and a minute or two of the product is faster than any paragraph on this page at telling you whether the shape of it fits yours.
YouTube · Firecrawl Introducing Firecrawl - The API to search, scrape, and interact with the web 1:06 · Published May 2026A minute, and it is the whole product as three endpoints: search, scrape, interact. The million developers figure is Firecrawl's claim about itself. Everything priced on this page came from their own pricing and docs pages instead.
Published 21 May 2026 on Firecrawl, the channel Firecrawl's own pages link to, and read on 13 October 2026. Nothing in it is a source for a price or a limit on this page: every figure in the tables above comes from a Firecrawl page.
Strengths and limits
Firecrawl does one job and the pricing, limits and docs are all built around that one job.
What it does well
- Clean Markdown from any URL, with JavaScript rendered and the page furniture stripped.
- A free plan of 1,000 credits a month, plus endpoints that need no key at all.
- Published per-endpoint rate limits and per-plan concurrency, both in one table.
- Honest documentation: it tells you the rate limit is not your bottleneck.
- Open source, so you can inspect it or self-host it.
- The per-credit rate drops four times over between Hobby and Standard.
Where it falls short
- Concurrency is low on the cheap plans: 2 browsers on Free and 5 on Hobby.
- The jump from 5,000 to 100,000 credits means there is nothing between $16 and $83.
- Top-up credits cost more per unit than the plan they top up.
- It returns pages, not records, so anything structured is your problem or an extra extract call.
- No contact data at all, so it is a complement to an enrichment provider rather than a substitute.
Where Firecrawl data comes from, and what you may do with it
The question that arrives late and expensively is not how good the data is, it is who is allowed to hold it. These are the fields each one returns, the coverage it claims and the compliance it publishes.
| Provider | Fields returned | Coverage | Compliance | Redistribution |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Firecrawl | Firmographics, Technographics, Intent and news | Global | GDPR DPA SOC 2 Type II | Not stated |
None of these states a redistribution position on its pricing or docs pages. Internally that never matters. Put the rows in something your customers can see and it becomes the question your legal team asks first.
Two practical notes that apply to every provider on this page. A compliance badge describes the vendor, not your use of it, so a GDPR DPA does not give you a lawful basis for the outreach you send. And every one of these vendors runs its own opt-out, which means a person who asks you to delete their record has to be removed from your copy as well as from theirs.
If Firecrawl is not the answer
Four providers in the Sourcing APIs listing that solve the same problem differently. Each one is a trade, and the trade is named.
Exa
$4/1k searchesSearch built to be read by a model, at $4 to $7 per 1,000 searches with $10 of credits free monthly. The right move when discovery, not fetching, is the job.
Tavily
$0.008/creditOne credit a query, 1,000 free a month, and it also does crawl and extract. The cheapest place to start if you need both halves.
TheirStack
$49/moIf you were crawling job boards or company sites to detect hiring and tooling, buy that as a dataset instead of rebuilding it.
The full set, organized by the reason people leave, is on the Firecrawl alternatives page.
Before you build against it
Five things to settle first, each one read off Firecrawl's own pages. The ticks are remembered in this browser, so you can come back to a half-finished integration.
Who should actually buy this
Buy Firecrawl when your trigger lives on a company's own website and nowhere else. A pricing page that changed, a careers page that lists a new role, a customer logo that appeared, a docs page that mentions a competitor: none of that is a field in any database in this directory, and all of it is one scrape away.
Start on the free plan or even keyless, because both are real. 1,000 credits a month will tell you whether the pages you care about parse cleanly, which is the only question that matters before you commit. Sites that fight scrapers will fight this one too.
Size the plan on concurrency rather than credits. Most teams work out their credit need correctly and then discover that 5 concurrent browsers on Hobby means a 10,000-page job takes most of a day. If the job has a deadline, the number to look at is the browsers column.
Reading the web is easy. Knowing what to read is not.
A scraper pointed at every page of every account burns credits and returns noise. The teams getting value from this wrote down the trigger first. Frontal builds the map step, the filter and the extraction into a pipeline that runs inside your stack.
Worked with 300+ companies. A senior operator runs your account.
What Firecrawl users say, in their own words
The one part of this page that is not a vendor claim. Quotes are transcribed as written and linked to the thread.
A credit is a page until you turn on the features you came for
The credit inflation thing is crazy. From "1 credit = 1 page" to burning 5-9 per page the second you enable anything actually useful is not an accident, that's a deliberate design choice if you ask me. [...] Product is good, no question. Just know what you're getting into before you start building on it
r/ProxyEngineering · May 2026 · 3 points
The mechanism is confirmed by Firecrawl's own documentation, which states that operations cost different amounts of credits and names JSON extraction and Interact as the dear ones, so heavier usage reaches the credit cap sooner. That is the thing to model before sizing a plan: the rate card above quotes 1 credit a page, and the page you actually want is usually not a basic scrape.
The 5 to 9 multiplier is this commenter's own and nothing here verifies it, and the rest of their comment is about GitHub stars and the self-hosting license rather than about the API. Take the shape of the warning, read the operations table against your own pipeline, and treat the baseline rate as the cheap case rather than the typical one.
14 threads read on 13 October 2026, searched by vendor name. Scores and dates are the comment's own. Nothing here is the only source for a price or a limit on this site: every figure in the tables above comes from a vendor's own page.
Firecrawl API, answered
Is the Firecrawl API free?
Free plan, 1,000 credits a month, no card. Keyless scrape and search too. Paid use starts at $16/mo.
How much does the Firecrawl API cost?
Firecrawl starts at $16/mo, which works out at $0.0032 per credit. Billing is subscription, credit packs and free tier. Read from Firecrawl's own pricing page on 8 October 2026.
What are the Firecrawl API rate limits?
Per team, per endpoint: 10/min scrape on Free to 10,000 on Scale. Concurrency binds first.
How do I get a Firecrawl API key?
Bearer token, and some endpoints work with no key at all. The current steps are in Firecrawl's own documentation, which is authoritative on anything that has changed since 8 October 2026.
Does Firecrawl have an MCP server?
Yes. Hosted, with a keyless tier. It is listed with the others on the MCP page.