Olostep vs Firecrawl Pricing per 1,000 Pages

Olostep and Firecrawl sell the same core job: send a URL, get back clean markdown or JSON a model can use, with JavaScript rendered for you. Both price it in credits, both have a $99 plan called Standard, and both will crawl a site, map its URLs and run a web search from the same API key. That makes them easy to shortlist together and surprisingly hard to compare, because a credit buys a different amount of work on each side.

This comparison prices both from their own published numbers, then runs four real workloads through each. The short version is that the cheaper vendor depends almost entirely on one question: are you collecting pages, or are you extracting fields?

How much does Olostep cost?

Olostep has a free trial of 500 requests and three self-serve plans: Starter at $9 a month for 5,000 successful requests, Standard at $99 for 200,000 and Scale at $399 for 1,000,000. Every plan renders JavaScript and routes through residential IP addresses at no extra credit cost, which is unusual in this category.

The per-endpoint costs sit in the Olostep documentation. A scrape, a crawled page and a batch URL each cost 1 credit. A scrape with a parser costs 1 to 5 credits depending on the parser. A scrape with LLM extract costs 10. A search costs 5 credits plus the normal rate for any results you scrape, and an Answers request costs 20. Top-up packs are sold separately at $20 for 10,000 credits, $200 for 250,000 and $1,000 for 2,000,000, valid for six months. Our Olostep pricing breakdown works through every line.

How much does Firecrawl cost?

Firecrawl has a free tier of 1,000 credits a month, then Hobby at $19 a month for 5,000 credits, Standard at $99 for 100,000, Growth at $399 for 500,000 and Scale at $749 for 1,000,000 on monthly billing. Paying yearly brings those to $16, $83, $333 and $599 a month.

One credit buys one page from scrape, crawl or map. Search costs 2 credits per 10 results. Asking for JSON, question or highlight output adds 4 credits a page, so a typed page costs 5. Extra credits on a paid plan are sold in $5 steps that buy 1,000 credits on Hobby, 2,000 on Standard, 2,500 on Growth and 5,000 on Scale. A scrape that returns nothing is not charged, but a page that comes back with an error status such as 403 or 404 still costs a credit. The full ladder is in our Firecrawl pricing guide.

Olostep vs Firecrawl pricing plan by plan

Lined up at the same price points, Olostep gives more credits per dollar at every paid step, and Firecrawl gives more for free.

Two things stand out. On plain pages Olostep costs half as much at $99 and at $399, and close to half at a million credits. On search the order flips: an Olostep search is 5 credits, $2.48 per 1,000 searches on Standard, while a Firecrawl search of 10 results is 2 credits, $1.98 per 1,000.

Is Olostep cheaper than Firecrawl?

Yes for plain pages, no for search, and neither for typed output through a model. The typed case is the one that surprises people. Olostep has twice the credits at $99 but charges twice as many for an LLM extraction, so the two plans land on the same number of typed pages. Here are four workloads at list price.

Olostep has one more route to structured data that Firecrawl does not price the same way. Its parsers return JSON for 1 to 5 credits instead of 10, because a parser is written for a specific site or page type and does not call a model on every page. If your targets are covered by a parser, 100,000 typed pages cost 100,000 to 500,000 credits, which is $99 to $399 rather than a flat $399. If your targets are a long tail of different layouts, plan for the 10 credit rate. Olostep also says the LLM extract cost can be lowered with your own model keys or usage-based pricing, arranged by email.

Is Olostep better than Firecrawl?

On price per plain page and on blocked targets, usually. Olostep sends every request through a residential IP and bills only successful requests, so a site that turns away datacenter traffic is more likely to answer and a failure is not meant to cost you. Its batch endpoint is built for large asynchronous jobs, and its published concurrency is high for the price: 150 concurrent requests on the $9 plan and 500 on Standard.

Firecrawl is the better pick in other ways. It is open source, so you can run it yourself or read exactly what it does. Its SDKs, LangChain and LlamaIndex loaders and MCP server are widely used, which shortens integration. The free tier renews every month instead of ending after a trial. And its schema extraction takes a JSON schema directly, with change tracking and monitoring on the same key. Teams that value that ecosystem often accept the higher price per page.

What does 100,000 typed pages cost on each?

This is the workload where both vendors cost the same and a third option is cheaper, so it deserves its own answer. 100,000 pages returned as typed fields cost $399 on Olostep Scale through LLM extract and $399 on Firecrawl Growth through JSON format, or $333 on Firecrawl if you pay yearly.

ClawEngine prices that job differently, and we are the vendor here, so weigh this accordingly. Schema extraction is part of the page price on our plans rather than a multiplier. The Startup plan is $99 a month for about 250,000 pages with typed fields included, around $0.40 per 1,000, so the same 100,000 typed pages fit inside $99 with room to spare. Scale is $399 for about 1,500,000 pages.

The trade is real and you should know it before you switch. We run no residential proxy pool and do not defeat anti-bot systems, so targets that block ordinary traffic are a job for Olostep or a dedicated unblocker. We have no web search and no free plan, and our lowest tier is $49, well above Olostep's $9. If your pages are public, your list of sites is known and your output is structured, the flat page price wins. If any of those is not true, one of the two vendors above is the better buy. Our cheapest web scraping API comparison ranks the wider field by cost per 1,000 pages.

How to choose between Olostep and Firecrawl

Count your pages for a normal month, split them into plain and typed, then price each pile on its own.

• Mostly plain markdown, any volume: Olostep, at roughly half the cost per page.
• Targets that block datacenter IPs: Olostep, because residential routing is included and failures are not billed.
• Prototype or hobby project: Firecrawl, for the 1,000 free credits that renew monthly and the open source option.
• Deep framework integrations and MCP: Firecrawl, for the larger ecosystem.
• Typed fields from sites with ready parsers: Olostep parsers at 1 to 5 credits.
• Typed fields from many different public sites at volume: a flat per-page crawl API, since both credit systems charge $3.99 to $4.95 per 1,000 for it.

Whichever you pick, test with your own hundred most typical URLs before you commit to a plan, and read the credits consumed on each response. Think about where the rows go afterwards too: once typed fields land in your database, the rest of the team can query that data in plain English instead of waiting on an engineer for every question. For more vendors priced the same way, see the Olostep alternatives page and our cheaper Firecrawl alternative breakdown.