Firecrawl turns websites into LLM-ready markdown: give it a URL or a domain, get back clean text instead of HTML you have to strip. It is built for the retrieval-augmented-generation case, and it is good at it.
It is on this page because it keeps appearing in "social data API" comparisons, and the honest answer is that it is a crawler, not a social API — which matters more than the price.
What it costs
| Plan | Price/month | Credits/month | Per 1,000 credits |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 1,000 | — |
| Hobby | $16 | 5,000 | $3.20 |
| Standard | $83 | 100,000 | $0.83 |
| Growth | $333 | 500,000 | $0.67 |
| Scale | $599 | 1,000,000 | $0.60 |
| Enterprise | custom | custom | — |
A credit is roughly one page, or about half a search. Paid plans top up in $5 increments when the monthly allowance runs out.
⚠️ Those are the annual prices
Their page displays "$16/month (billed annually)" and the same for every paid tier. The month-to-month price is higher and is not what the page shows first.
We are flagging it because this is the second pricing page in this family that displays an annual rate in a monthly slot — Xpoz does it too, and it is apparently becoming a convention. If you are modelling costs from comparison pages, including this one, the number you want is the one matching your billing cycle, and most pages do not say which they quoted.
The real difference, which is not price
Firecrawl gives you the page, cleaned. We give you the fields, named.
Point Firecrawl at an Instagram profile and you get readable markdown of
whatever that page rendered. You do not get followers as an integer across
eleven platforms in one response shape, because that is not what it is for — and
building it on top means owning eleven parsers and the day each one changes.
The inverse is also true and we will say it: point us at a documentation site, a job board or a blog, and we have nothing for you. Firecrawl covers everything with a URL. We cover eleven platforms and tell you exactly which fields each one fills.
Who it's for
Firecrawl is the right purchase for RAG: ingesting documentation, knowledge bases, or any corpus where "clean text from a URL" is the whole requirement. At $0.60 per 1,000 pages at scale, it is cheap for that job.
It is the wrong purchase if what you need is structured social metrics, and the tell is simple: if you find yourself writing a parser after the API responds, you bought the wrong tool.
Where it is better than us
Any URL at all. We have eleven platforms. They have the web.
Markdown output built for models. We return JSON for programs. For stuffing a context window, their output shape is better than ours.
The free tier. 1,000 credits a month, renewing, no card. Ours is 1,000 credits too — but ours are API calls against eleven specific platforms, and theirs are pages from anywhere.
The legal part
A general crawler puts the target choice, and therefore the compliance question, on the buyer. That is not worse than our model — it is a different place for the same question to sit.
We publish where we think the line is and a removal route.
Who measured this
We did, and we are only partly a competitor — for the RAG job we are not an alternative at all, and saying otherwise would be the kind of comparison this page exists to avoid.
The per-thousand column is our arithmetic on their plan prices and credit counts. The annual-billing caveat is the number we would check first, because it is the one that makes a comparison wrong without making it look wrong.
What we run is an hourly archive of what's rising across public platforms — a question a crawler cannot answer retroactively, because the past was not captured.
Plan prices and credit counts read from firecrawl.dev/pricing on 2 October 2026 — primary source, read directly from the page. The page displays annual billing ("$16/month billed annually"); the month-to-month prices are higher and are not transcribed here, because we did not read them. The per-1,000 column is our arithmetic on their numbers. Verify before deciding.