Firecrawl Credits Explained: What 1,000 Free Credits a Month Buys
Last fact-checked: November 9, 2026
Firecrawl turns web pages into data for AI agents, and it bills in credits. The price list shows plan sizes, but what matters is how many credits one request burns. A plain page scrape is cheap; adding structured extraction or a search changes the math quickly.
Note on experience: we have not run production workloads on Firecrawl and make no claim about result quality, speed or reliability. This is a reading of the official pricing page and billing docs on November 9, 2026. Prices and credit costs can change.
1. Credits per operation, as documented
† marks a referral link (see the disclosure above). "Not stated" means the page we read did not say.
| Operation | Firecrawl † credit cost |
|---|---|
| Scrape | 1 credit per page |
| Crawl | 1 credit per page |
| Map | 1 credit per call |
| Search | 2 credits per 10 results (rounded up per 10; scraped results add per-page costs) |
| JSON format (LLM extraction) | +4 credits per page, on top of the base cost |
| PDF parsing | +1 credit per PDF page |
| Enhanced proxy | Billed at the same 1 credit; an escalated retry is not charged separately |
| Interact (browser sessions) | 2 credits per browser minute |
| Other add-ons | Prompt-injection check +4, zero data retention +1, PII redaction +4 |
| Extract endpoint | Not stated as a separate credit line |
| Screenshots | Not stated |
The billing docs say modifiers stack: JSON format plus zero data retention is 1 + 4 + 1 = 6 credits per page. A request that returns a document, including a 403 or 404 response, costs 1 credit plus option costs; a request that returns no document costs 0 credits, with a few listed exceptions such as the threat-protection scan.
2. Plans, as listed on the pricing page
| Plan | Price per month | Credits per month | Concurrent browsers |
|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 1,000 | 2 |
| Hobby | $19 ($16/mo billed yearly) | 5,000 | 5 |
| Standard | $99 ($83/mo billed yearly) | 100,000 | 25 |
| Growth | $399 ($333/mo billed yearly) | 500,000 | 50 |
| Scale | $749 ($599/mo billed yearly) | 1,000,000 | 100 |
Free-plan rate limits are 10 requests per minute on scrape, map and search, and 2 per minute on crawl, agent and interact. The pricing page describes Free credits as recurring monthly, not a one-time grant, and says searches and scrapes share one balance. Plan credits do not roll over by default; Scale plans roll unused credits over for one month, and pay-as-you-go credits stay on the account until used but expire if the subscription is canceled.
3. What the credits buy (our arithmetic)
The figures below are our own calculations from the published numbers above, using the monthly price. They are not Firecrawl's claims, and they ignore retries and failures.
| Workload | Credits each | Free plan (1,000 credits) | Cost per 1,000 units on Standard ($99 / 100,000 credits) |
|---|---|---|---|
| Plain page scrape | 1 | 1,000 pages | $0.99 |
| Scrape with JSON format | 1 + 4 = 5 | 200 pages | $4.95 |
| Search, 10 results, no scraping | 2 | 500 searches | $1.98 |
| Scrape a PDF page | 1 + 1 = 2 | 500 PDF pages | $1.98 |
On Hobby ($19 for 5,000 credits) a plain scrape works out to $3.80 per 1,000 pages, and the same JSON-format scrape works out to $19.00 per 1,000 pages. Moving from Hobby to Standard cuts the per-credit price from $0.0038 to $0.00099, so heavy users pay far less per page than hobby users, while light users get no benefit from the bigger plan.
4. How to use this
- Prototyping an agent: the Free plan's 1,000 credits cover roughly 1,000 plain pages or 200 JSON-format pages a month at the stated costs. That is enough to test a workflow, not to run one.
- Watch the add-ons: JSON extraction multiplies the cost of a page by 5. If you only need clean text or markdown, skip it.
- Searches add up: a search that also scrapes its results pays the search cost plus each scrape.
- Plan for the reset: unused credits do not roll over, so buying a larger plan "just in case" wastes credits in slow months.
If you are comparing vendors rather than just Firecrawl, see ScraperAPI vs ScrapingBee, Free Tiers of Web-Data Tools Compared and Web-Data MCP Servers Compared. If you want to try Firecrawl's free plan, the Firecrawl † signup link supports this site.
5. What we could not confirm
- Credit cost of the Extract endpoint, screenshots and stealth proxy: not stated on the pages we read.
- Rate limits for paid plans (the billing doc points to a separate Rate Limits page we did not read).
- The affiliate-program terms shown to us differ between Firecrawl's own pages and our partner dashboard; this article does not rely on them.
- Success rates, speed and data quality. We have not measured them.
- These pages were read through a web-fetch tool that summarises pages, not a manual read of the rendered pages; check the live pricing page before you buy.