Firecrawl

Firecrawl is a scrape / crawl / search API that returns LLM-ready markdown. github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl had 168,354 stars the same day, license AGPL-3.0. Latest GitHub release on the public page was v2.11.0 (2026-06-19). The old 70k-star / 96% of the web / $16-only Hobby copy is out.

Compare Browserbase if you wanted a hosted browser, and LangChain if you only needed a crawler connector inside an existing graph.

Key Features

Scrape / Crawl / Map / Search / Extract: First-party pricing still prices Scrape, Crawl, Map, and Monitor at 1 credit / page, Search at 2 credits / 10 results, Interact at 2 credits / browser minute. JSON and Enhanced Mode add +4 credits.
Agent preview: 5 free daily runs, then dynamic credit pricing. Do not treat Agent as unlimited.
LLM-ready markdown: That is the product. "67% fewer tokens" and "50x faster than Apify" are vendor quotes, not numbers we re-measured.
Self-host: The GitHub tree is AGPL-3.0. Cloud reliability and anti-bot are what you pay $19-$399 for.

Use Cases

RAG ingest of a docs site, billed as 1 credit / page on Crawl.
Agents that need a URL-to-markdown primitive without running Puppeteer.
Teams comparing Hobby $19 vs Standard $99 on 5k vs 100k credits.

Limitation: Self-serve credits do not roll over. Scale/Enterprise can. We did not keep 350,000 developers, $14.5M Series A, or "covers 96% of the web" as current first-party pricing facts.

Pricing

firecrawl.dev/pricing.md on 2026-08-17. Monthly first.

Plan	Monthly	Yearly toggle	Credits / concurrency
Free	$0	-	1,000 credits, 2 concurrent.
Hobby	$19	$16 / month ($190 / year)	5,000 credits, 5 concurrent.
Standard	$99	$83 / month ($990 / year)	100,000 credits, 50 concurrent.
Growth	$399	$333 / month ($3,990 / year)	500,000 credits, 100 concurrent.
Scale	$749	$599 / month ($7,190 / year)	1,000,000 credits, 150 concurrent.
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	Custom credits, SSO, ZDR, SLA.

If a leftover blog still lists only Hobby $16 / Standard $83 / Growth $333, those are the yearly column, not the monthly sticker.

Getting Started

Open firecrawl.dev/pricing and burn the 1,000 Free credits on one docs domain.
Read the credit table on pricing.md before you turn on JSON or Enhanced Mode.
Pay Hobby $19 before you assume Standard $99 is required.
Self-host from github.com/firecrawl/firecrawl only after you accept AGPL-3.0.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Hobby still $16?

$16 is the yearly toggle. The monthly Hobby sticker is $19.

Do unused credits roll over?

Not on Free / Hobby / Standard / Growth. Rollover is on Scale and Enterprise.

Same as Browserbase?

No. Browserbase hosts browsers. Firecrawl sells URL-to-markdown credits.

Alternatives

Browserbase: Hosted browser sessions if you need clicks, not markdown.
LangChain: Orchestration if scraping is only one node.

Tips

Quote monthly $19 / $99 / $399 first, then the yearly $16 / $83 / $333 toggle.
Do not paste 70k stars or 96% coverage into a deck.
Confirm +4 credit add-ons before you enable JSON extract on a full crawl.

Conclusion

Firecrawl is a credit-metered crawl API with a public $19-$399 self-serve ladder, not a 70k-star slogan. Start at firecrawl.dev/pricing, then decide whether Browserbase already covers the fetch you need.