Free Web Scraping APIs in 2026: Firecrawl, ZenRows, ScraperAPI, Jina Reader, Apify and More

A web scraping API fetches a page for you (through proxies, often in a real browser) and hands back HTML, Markdown or JSON. Most of them have a free tier, but "free" means very different things: a monthly allowance, a one-time trial balance, or a dollar credit you spend on compute. On 2026-10-28 we read the pricing page of each service below and noted how many pages the free part really buys. The page counts are our arithmetic from each vendor's published credit costs.

Free web scraping APIs side by side

Source: each vendor's pricing page or docs, linked in the table and under Sources, checked 2026-10-28.

Monthly free tiers you can keep using

• ZenRows gives the most: its Free plan is "5,000 credits/month, always", with 5 concurrent requests and every feature except standalone residential proxies. A standard page costs 1 credit and a page with JavaScript rendering 5, so a site that needs a browser gets you about 1,000 pages. There are no top-ups on the free plan: when it runs out, you wait for the monthly refresh.
• Firecrawl turns pages into clean Markdown for LLMs: 1,000 credits a month, 1 credit per scraped or crawled page, 2 concurrent requests and 10 scrape requests a minute. Search costs 2 credits per 10 results. Its core is open source (AGPL-3.0) if you outgrow the cloud tier.
• ScraperAPI starts with a 7-day trial of 5,000 credits with no card; its docs say the free plan after that "comes with 1,000 API Credits per month", with at most 5 concurrent connections.
• Context.dev gives 1,000 credits a month at 1 credit per page scrape, and its FAQ says "JS rendering, anti-bot bypass, and proxies are included in the base scrape price"; browser actions cost 2 credits. The catch is 2 concurrent requests.
• Apify is a platform of ready-made scrapers (Actors) rather than one endpoint. The Free plan includes "$5 to spend in Apify Store or on your own Actors" each month at $0.2 per compute unit (1 GB of RAM for an hour); when it is spent, "you'll be blocked until the next billing cycle".

One-time balances for a test

• Scrapfly: "1,000 credits on signup. No credit card, no time limit." A simple HTTP request on a datacenter IP costs 1 credit; a browser, residential IPs or screenshots cost more.
• ScrapingBee: 1,000 free API credits with no card. A request with JavaScript rendering costs 5 credits and premium proxies 10 or 25, so the trial is closer to 200 rendered pages.
• Jina Reader: a new API key comes with 10M free tokens, shared with Jina's other APIs, and Reader charges by the length of the page it returns. Without any key you can still read pages at 20 requests a minute.

Search APIs that also read pages

If your agent first searches and then reads the results, two search APIs can do the reading too. Tavily's Extract endpoint costs 1 credit per 5 successful URLs on its free 1,000 credits a month, and Exa charges $1 per 1,000 pages of text from a $10 balance that resets monthly. For the search side, see the free web search API guide.

Self-hosted: Crawl4AI

Crawl4AI is an open-source crawler (Apache-2.0, release v0.9.5 on 2026-10-14) that turns sites into Markdown for LLMs. It costs nothing but your own server, and you handle proxies and blocking yourself. Firecrawl's open-source core is the other self-hosted option.

Which one to pick

• The most free pages every month: ZenRows (5,000 plain pages), then Tavily Extract if you already know the URLs.
• Markdown for an LLM or RAG pipeline: Firecrawl, or Jina Reader for a quick test with no account. To weigh Firecrawl against the rest, see free Firecrawl alternatives.
• Sites that block bots: Context.dev charges no extra for anti-bot; elsewhere a browser or premium proxy multiplies the cost per page.
• Ready-made scrapers for a specific site: Apify's store, within $5 a month.
• Unlimited volume: Crawl4AI on your own machine.

Steps

1. Sign up for Firecrawl at firecrawl.dev (no card) and copy the API key.
2. Scrape one page to Markdown: curl -X POST https://api.firecrawl.dev/v2/scrape -H "Authorization: Bearer $FIRECRAWL_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"url": "https://example.com", "formats": ["markdown"]}'
3. Or try Jina Reader with no account: curl https://r.jina.ai/https://example.com
4. Check the credit counter in the dashboard before you run a crawl: one crawl can use a whole month's allowance.

Limits and the catch

• Credits are not pages. JavaScript rendering, premium or residential proxies and screenshots cost several credits per page, so a free tier can shrink five-fold on hard sites.
• Concurrency is low. Free plans allow 2 to 5 requests at once, which is fine for testing and slow for a big crawl.
• Trials end. ScraperAPI's 5,000 credits last 7 days; Scrapfly's and ScrapingBee's 1,000 credits do not refill.
• Scraping has rules of its own. A free tier does not change a site's terms of use or robots.txt; check them before you scrape at scale.