Firecrawl is a scraping and web-data API that converts websites into clean markdown or JSON for AI agents, with a free tier and paid plans from $16/month.
Firecrawl is a web data infrastructure company founded in 2022 by Caleb Peffer, Eric Ciarla, and Nicolas Camara through Y Combinator's Summer 2022 cohort, headquartered in San Francisco. The product is built specifically for the AI era: instead of scraping raw HTML, Firecrawl returns clean markdown, structured JSON, or screenshots that large language models can consume directly, stripping out navigation, ads, and boilerplate.
The company raised a $14.5 million Series A in August 2025 led by Nexus Venture Partners, with participation from Shopify's CEO, bringing total funding to roughly $16 million. Its core engine is dual-licensed open source under AGPL-3.0, and the project has attracted over 100,000 GitHub stars alongside millions of weekly SDK downloads.
Firecrawl exposes a single API surface for several related actions: Scrape extracts a single URL with automatic JavaScript rendering, Crawl follows links across an entire site, Search finds and returns full-page results for a query, and Interact allows an agent to click, navigate, and operate a page to reach dynamic content behind interactions.
The company reports handling roughly 96% of the web including JavaScript-heavy pages, with a median performance benchmarked as significantly faster than typical scraping stacks, and token-efficient output that strips irrelevant content to reduce the size of what gets fed into an LLM context window.
Firecrawl prices on a credit system: a free tier includes 1,000 credits per month, roughly equivalent to 1,000 scraped pages. Paid plans start at Hobby for $16 per month (5,000 credits), then Standard at $83 per month (100,000 credits), Growth at $333 per month (500,000 credits), and Scale at $599 per month (1,000,000 credits).
Actions are metered differently: Scrape, Crawl, Map, and Monitor cost 1 credit per page, Search costs 2 credits per 10 results, and Interact costs 2 credits per browser-minute. Enterprise customers negotiate custom annual agreements above the Scale tier.
Yes, it offers a free tier with 1,000 credits per month before paid plans starting at $16 per month are required.
Its core engine is dual-licensed under AGPL-3.0 and available on GitHub, alongside a hosted, paid API service.
It returns clean markdown, structured JSON, HTML, or screenshots optimized for LLM consumption.
It was founded in 2022 by Caleb Peffer, Eric Ciarla, and Nicolas Camara through Y Combinator, and is based in San Francisco.
Feeding clean, structured web content into AI agents, RAG pipelines, search tools, and data enrichment workflows.