Free Tiers of Web-Data Tools for AI Agents, Compared

Last fact-checked: November 8, 2026

Advertising disclosure: we may receive a commission if you sign up through the ScraperAPI or Firecrawl links marked † in this article, at no extra cost to you. We have not tested these tools ourselves; everything below comes from each vendor's official pages. Our applications to Apify, Make and Bright Data are still pending, so links to those go to the official sites. See our Advertising Disclosure.

If an AI agent needs web data, the first question is not "which tool is best" but "how much can I do before I pay anything?" Every vendor below has a free offer, and each measures it in a different unit: dollars, credits, "units", requests, or time. This page puts them side by side.

Note on experience: we have not run production workloads on any of these tools. The numbers come from each vendor's pricing page or documentation, checked on November 8, 2026. Plans change, so check the source before you rely on a figure.

1. The free offers side by side

† marks a referral link (see the disclosure above).

Tool	Free offer	Concurrency	Card needed?
Apify	$5 of platform usage per month ($0.20 per compute unit, so 25 CU)	5 concurrent runs	No
Firecrawl †	1,000 credits per month	2 concurrent requests	No
ScraperAPI †	7-day trial with 5,000 API credits; the free plan is then 1,000 credits per month	5 concurrent connections (free plan)	Not required for the trial
ScrapingBee	1,000 free API credits (credits are valid one month and do not roll over)	Not stated for the trial	No
Browserless	1k units per month, 2-minute max session	2 max concurrent browsers	Not stated for the Free plan
Bright Data Web MCP	5,000 MCP requests per month	Not stated	No

2. What a "credit" actually buys

Firecrawl: the pricing page lists 1 credit per page for scrape and crawl, 1 credit per call for map, and 2 credits per 10 search results. So the 1,000 free credits are up to 1,000 scraped pages, or 500 searches, drawn from one shared balance.
Apify: compute units, not requests. 1024 MB for one hour is 1 CU, so $5 buys 25 CU. Our walkthrough: Apify Free Plan Explained.
ScraperAPI and ScrapingBee: both price per API request in credits. We did not verify how many credits one request costs once options such as JavaScript rendering or premium proxies are switched on, so we cannot turn their free credits into a page count.
Browserless: the free plan is 1k "units" per month. The pages we read did not define a unit, so we cannot convert it either.
Bright Data Web MCP: 5,000 requests per month, but the page does not say which tools are free and which are paid.

3. Which one to try first

You want to hand an agent a URL and get page content back, with the simplest meter: start with Firecrawl †. One credit per scraped page is the easiest conversion in this list.
You want an HTTP API you call from your own code, with the vendor handling blocking: compare ScraperAPI † and ScrapingBee. ScraperAPI's 5,000-credit trial is larger than ScrapingBee's 1,000 free credits, but the credit cost per request is unverified for both.
You want a ready-made scraper for a specific site, or long-running jobs: Apify, where the free $5 is measured in compute time.
You need a real headless browser session: Browserless, keeping in mind the 2-minute session cap on the free plan.
Your agent already speaks MCP: Bright Data's Web MCP free tier is the cheapest way to see it in action.

Still deciding between a general automation hub and a scraping platform? Read Make vs Apify: Which Should You Try First?

4. A 30-minute test that works for any of them

Write down 20 URLs you actually need, including a few that are hard to fetch.
Run the same 20 through two tools.
Count empty results as well as errors. A page that returns nothing without raising an error is easy to miss.
Note how many free credits those 20 consumed, then scale to your real monthly volume.

5. What we could not confirm