Free Firecrawl Alternatives
Free alternatives to Firecrawl for scraping pages into LLM-ready text: Context.dev, Jina Reader, Tavily Extract, Exa and Browser Use, next to Firecrawl Free.
Firecrawl turns web pages into clean Markdown for LLM agents and RAG, and its free plan gives 1,000 credits a month with no card: about 1,000 scraped pages at 2 concurrent requests. It is in the table as the baseline. The alternatives below do the same job a different way. Context.dev has the same 1,000 monthly credits but includes JavaScript rendering, anti-bot bypass and proxies in the base price; Jina Reader converts any URL to text with no key at all, or bills a free 10M-token key; Tavily and Exa are search APIs whose extract and contents endpoints read known URLs from a monthly allowance; Browser Use drives a real browser for pages that need clicks. Every row is a live offer from the same catalog as the free AI coding tools directory, with its card rule and catch. For dedicated scraping APIs that are not in the catalog yet (ZenRows, ScraperAPI, Apify, Scrapfly, ScrapingBee), see the free web scraping API guide, checked against each pricing page.
| Option | What is free | Card | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| Firecrawl Free Planbaseline | 1,000 free web scraping credits a month, no credit card | no card | Catch: Free plan has low rate limits (e.g. 2/min for crawl), 2 concurrent requests, and unused credits do not roll over. |
| Context.dev Free Plan | 1,000 free API credits every month for scraping, extraction, and brand data | no card | Catch: No overage — API calls return 401 once the 1,000 monthly credits run out, and heavy endpoints burn them fast (Answers costs 100 credits a call). |
| Jina AI 10M Free API Tokens | 10M free tokens across Jina embeddings, reranker, and reader APIs | no card | Catch: The 10M tokens are one-time and shared across all Jina APIs; a web search costs from 10,000 tokens. The Reader models are CC-BY-NC 4.0, so self-hosting them commercially needs a license. |
| Tavily Free Researcher Plan | 1,000 free Tavily search API credits a month, no credit card | no card | Catch: Requests stop when the 1,000 monthly credits run out until the reset on the 1st; development keys are limited to 100 requests per minute. |
| Exa Free Credits | $10 free API credits on signup + $10 onboarding bonus, $10 monthly reset | no card | Catch: Free use is capped at 10 search queries per second and 50 agent concurrency; credit expiration is not documented. |
| Browser Use $1 Signup Credit | One-time $1 signup credit on Browser Use's browser-automation platform | no card | Catch: Agents bill model tokens plus a 20% service fee plus browser time and traffic; the credit is once per person for eligible signups only. |
The 6 options, in detail
Firecrawl Free Plan
1,000 free web scraping credits a month, no credit card
- 1,000 credits/month, refreshed monthly
- 1 credit = 1 page on basic scrape, crawl, or map
- Search costs 2 credits per 10 results; Interact costs 2 credits per browser minute
- 2 concurrent requests
Catch: Free plan has low rate limits (e.g. 2/min for crawl), 2 concurrent requests, and unused credits do not roll over.
Context.dev Free Plan
1,000 free API credits every month for scraping, extraction, and brand data
- 1,000 API credits per month, renewing monthly; no overage — calls return 401 when credits are depleted
- 2 concurrent API requests per organization; no per-minute cap by default
- 10,000 one-time Logo Link requests (separate quota; Logo Link does not consume API credits)
- 10 concurrent monitors, 1 concurrent batch
Catch: No overage — API calls return 401 once the 1,000 monthly credits run out, and heavy endpoints burn them fast (Answers costs 100 credits a call).
Jina AI 10M Free API Tokens
10M free tokens across Jina embeddings, reranker, and reader APIs
- 10M tokens per new API key, shared across Reader, Embeddings, Reranker, Classifier, Segmenter
- Free key: Reader 500 RPM; Embeddings/Reranker 100 RPM and 100K TPM
- s.jina.ai search costs from 10,000 tokens per request
- IP cap of 10,000 requests per 60 seconds
Catch: The 10M tokens are one-time and shared across all Jina APIs; a web search costs from 10,000 tokens. The Reader models are CC-BY-NC 4.0, so self-hosting them commercially needs a license.
Tavily Free Researcher Plan
1,000 free Tavily search API credits a month, no credit card
- 1,000 API credits per month on the free Researcher plan
- Credits reset on the first day of each month
- Basic search 1 credit, advanced search 2 credits; extract 1 credit per 5 URLs (basic) or 2 per 5 (advanced)
- Development keys: 100 requests per minute (crawl 100, research 20)
Catch: Requests stop when the 1,000 monthly credits run out until the reset on the 1st; development keys are limited to 100 requests per minute.
Exa Free Credits
$10 free API credits on signup + $10 onboarding bonus, $10 monthly reset
- $10 signup credit plus a one-time $10 onboarding bonus
- $10 free balance reset monthly on the 1st
- No payment method required
- 10 search QPS and 50 agent concurrency on the free plan
Catch: Free use is capped at 10 search queries per second and 50 agent concurrency; credit expiration is not documented.
Browser Use $1 Signup Credit
One-time $1 signup credit on Browser Use's browser-automation platform
- $1 once per person for eligible Google, GitHub, or Microsoft signups
- No card required; credit expiry: never
- 10 concurrent sessions at $0 lifetime spend, scaling to 1,000 at $25,000
- Minimum top-up $5 to unlock every model
Catch: Agents bill model tokens plus a 20% service fee plus browser time and traffic; the credit is once per person for eligible signups only.
Free forever by self-hosting
Open-source projects that do the same job on your own hardware, with no quota.
- Firecrawl (AGPL-3.0)
- Text Embeddings Inference (Apache-2.0) - CPU, or an NVIDIA GPU with CUDA compute capability 7.5 or newer
- SearXNG (AGPL-3.0)
Frequently asked questions
- Is Firecrawl free?
- Firecrawl has a free plan with 1,000 credits a month and no card. One credit scrapes, crawls or maps one page, search costs 2 credits per 10 results, and the free plan allows 2 concurrent requests. Unused credits do not roll over.
- What is the best free alternative to Firecrawl?
- For the same kind of monthly scraping allowance, Context.dev: 1,000 credits a month, 1 credit per page, with JavaScript rendering and proxies included. For a quick test with no account, Jina Reader reads any URL when you prefix it with r.jina.ai.
- Can I self-host Firecrawl for free?
- Yes. Firecrawl’s core is open source under AGPL-3.0; the cloud service adds features the self-hosted version lacks. Crawl4AI (Apache-2.0) is another open-source crawler that outputs Markdown for LLMs.
- Do these Firecrawl alternatives need a credit card?
- None of the six rows asks for a card for its free part. Jina’s 10M tokens and Browser Use’s $1 are one-time balances; Firecrawl, Context.dev, Tavily and Exa refill every month.