--- title: "Free Web Scraping APIs in 2026: Firecrawl, ZenRows, ScraperAPI, Jina Reader, Apify and More" slug: "free-web-scraping-api" description: "Free web scraping APIs checked on 2026-10-28: Firecrawl, ZenRows, ScraperAPI, Jina Reader, Apify and more, with pages per month, card rules and sources." published: "2026-10-28" updated: "2026-10-28" verifiedAt: "2026-10-28" canonical: "https://aifree.dev/learn/free-web-scraping-api" --- # Free Web Scraping APIs in 2026: Firecrawl, ZenRows, ScraperAPI, Jina Reader, Apify and More > Free web scraping APIs checked on 2026-10-28: Firecrawl, ZenRows, ScraperAPI, Jina Reader, Apify and more, with pages per month, card rules and sources. - Time: 5 minutes: sign up, copy the key, send one request - You need: An account with the provider; none of the services below asks for a card for its free part; For Jina Reader without a key: nothing, just prefix the page URL; For Crawl4AI: your own machine or server (open source, self-hosted) - Last checked: 2026-10-28 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 | Service | What is free | About how many pages | Resets | Card | Checked | | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | --- | | [Firecrawl](https://aifree.dev/offer/firecrawl-free-plan) | 1,000 credits a month | 1,000 pages (1 credit a page, Markdown out) | Monthly | No | 2026-10-28 | | [ZenRows](https://www.zenrows.com/pricing) | 5,000 credits a month | 5,000 plain pages, or 1,000 with JavaScript rendering (5 credits) | Monthly, no rollover | No | 2026-10-28 | | [ScraperAPI](https://www.scraperapi.com/pricing/) | 5,000 credits for a 7-day trial, then a free plan of 1,000 credits a month | 1,000 simple pages a month after the trial | Monthly | No | 2026-10-28 | | [Context.dev](https://aifree.dev/offer/context-dev-free-plan) | 1,000 credits a month | 1,000 pages; no surcharge for JavaScript or anti-bot | Monthly | No | 2026-10-28 | | [Jina Reader](https://aifree.dev/offer/jina-ai-free-api-tokens) | No key: 20 requests a minute; free key: 10M tokens | Depends on page length (billed by output tokens) | Never; one-time balance | No | 2026-10-28 | | [Tavily Extract](https://aifree.dev/offer/tavily-free-researcher-plan) | 1,000 credits a month | Up to 5,000 pages (1 credit per 5 successful URLs, basic) | Monthly | No | 2026-10-28 | | [Exa Contents](https://aifree.dev/offer/exa-free-credits) | $10 balance a month, plus a one-time $10 bonus | Up to 10,000 pages of text ($1 per 1,000) | Monthly, on the 1st | No | 2026-10-28 | | [Apify](https://apify.com/pricing) | $5 of platform credit a month | Depends on the scraper (Actor) and its compute | Monthly | No | 2026-10-28 | | [Scrapfly](https://scrapfly.io/pricing) | 1,000 credits on signup, no time limit | 1,000 simple pages (more credits with a browser or residential IPs) | Never | No | 2026-10-28 | | [ScrapingBee](https://www.scrapingbee.com/pricing/) | 1,000 credits to try | 200 pages with JavaScript rendering (5 credits each) | Never | No | 2026-10-28 | | [Crawl4AI](https://github.com/unclecode/crawl4ai) | Open source (Apache-2.0), you host it | Limited by your machine | n/a | n/a | 2026-10-28 | 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](https://aifree.dev/learn/free-web-search-api). ## Self-hosted: Crawl4AI [Crawl4AI](https://github.com/unclecode/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](https://aifree.dev/compare/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. ## Offers in this guide - [Firecrawl Free Plan](https://aifree.dev/offer/firecrawl-free-plan.md): 1,000 credits/month, no card. 1,000 free web scraping credits a month, no credit card - [Context.dev Free Plan](https://aifree.dev/offer/context-dev-free-plan.md): 1,000 credits/month, no card. 1,000 free API credits every month for scraping, extraction, and brand data - [Jina AI 10M Free API Tokens](https://aifree.dev/offer/jina-ai-free-api-tokens.md): 10,000,000 tokens, no card. 10M free tokens across Jina embeddings, reranker, and reader APIs - [Tavily Free Researcher Plan](https://aifree.dev/offer/tavily-free-researcher-plan.md): 1,000 credits/month, no card. 1,000 free Tavily search API credits a month, no credit card - [Exa Free Credits](https://aifree.dev/offer/exa-free-credits.md): $20, no card. $10 free API credits on signup + $10 onboarding bonus, $10 monthly reset ## Frequently asked questions ### Is there a free web scraping API? Yes. On 2026-10-28 ZenRows gave 5,000 credits a month, Firecrawl and Context.dev 1,000 credits a month, and ScraperAPI 1,000 credits a month after a 7-day trial of 5,000, all without a card. Jina Reader reads pages with no key at 20 requests a minute. ### Which free scraping API gives the most pages? ZenRows, at 5,000 credits a month: 5,000 plain pages or about 1,000 with JavaScript rendering. Tavily Extract can read up to 5,000 known URLs a month (1 credit per 5 URLs), and Exa up to 10,000 pages of text from its $10 monthly balance. ### Is Firecrawl free? Firecrawl has a free plan with 1,000 credits a month and no card: about 1,000 scraped pages, with 2 concurrent requests and 10 scrape requests a minute. Its open-source core (AGPL-3.0) can also be self-hosted. ### Can I scrape without an API key? Jina Reader works with no key: prefix any URL with https://r.jina.ai/ and you get the page as text, at 20 requests a minute. With a free key the limit rises to 500 requests a minute and usage is billed from 10M free tokens. ### Why does my free scraping quota run out so fast? Most services charge more credits for harder pages. ZenRows and ScrapingBee charge 5 credits for a page with JavaScript rendering, and premium or residential proxies cost more still. Context.dev is the exception: no surcharge for JavaScript or anti-bot. ## Sources - https://www.firecrawl.dev/pricing - https://www.zenrows.com/pricing - https://www.scraperapi.com/pricing/ - https://docs.scraperapi.com/resources/faq/plans-and-billing - https://www.context.dev/pricing - https://jina.ai/reader/ - https://www.tavily.com/pricing - https://docs.tavily.com/documentation/api-credits - https://exa.ai/pricing - https://apify.com/pricing - https://scrapfly.io/pricing - https://www.scrapingbee.com/pricing/ - https://github.com/unclecode/crawl4ai HTML page: https://aifree.dev/learn/free-web-scraping-api