Firecrawl review
By Jan Suski, six years working in digital. How the scoring works.
Firecrawl is a scraping API that returns a page as markdown or JSON, built for teams feeding web content into an LLM instead of teams driving a browser. Its /crawl endpoint walks a whole domain on its own and /map returns every URL on a site in one call (firecrawl.dev).
Pricing runs on credits: one per page for scrape, crawl and map, two per ten results for search, and two per browser minute for interact. Standard is $83 a month for 100,000 credits and 50 concurrent requests. Hobby is $16 for 5,000, Growth $333 for 500,000, Scale $599 for a million, and the free tier gives 1,000 credits with two concurrent requests.
Those are the yearly-billed rates the pricing page shows by default, so monthly billing costs more. The core is AGPL-3.0 and self-hostable, with SDKs under MIT across Python, Node, Go, Java, Rust, Ruby, .NET and PHP, plus Zapier, n8n & MCP integrations. The repo carries 166,200 stars.
Where it stops is the login screen. TinyFish's own testing put Firecrawl at 1 of 6 successes on sites running active bot protection, and Firecrawl's own materials position /interact for content behind a login while publishing no pass rate against protected sites. A team whose work starts after authentication should read the TinyFish review or Browserbase instead.
Buy it for bulk extraction of public pages into a pipeline. Skip it for anything that has to log in first.
This review is in progress. When published, it will score Firecrawl against our four-pillar methodology, fit, signal quality, workflow depth, and buyer caution, with hands-on findings, pricing notes, buyer checks, and a clear read on who should shortlist it and who should skip it.
Until then, our company data providers ranking covers Firecrawl against the other tools in the category. Reviews of TinyFish and Crunchbase are published already.