Spider vs Firecrawl Pricing per 1,000 Pages

Spider and Firecrawl turn up on the same shortlist because they sell the same job. Send a URL or a whole site, get back clean markdown that a model can read, with JavaScript rendered for you. Both crawl, both map a site's URLs, both run a web search from the same key. The difference is the meter, and it is a bigger difference than it looks, because one vendor prices the page and the other prices the bytes.

That is also why the comparisons already published disagree with each other by a factor of ten. Spider's own figures for itself run from about $0.03 to $0.48 per 1,000 pages depending on which page you read, and both can be correct. A bandwidth price only becomes a page price once you know what your pages weigh. This guide prices both vendors from their own published numbers, read on 13 October 2026, and then runs four workloads through each so the page weight is stated rather than assumed.

How much does Spider cost?

Spider is prepaid pay as you go. Credits cost $1 per 10,000, the minimum top-up is $1 and balances never expire. Every request draws two meters: bandwidth at $1 per GB, measured on the bytes Spider downloads before it converts them to markdown, and compute at $0.0001 per minute, prorated to the millisecond. Compute is capped at $0.003 per request, or $0.005 when a headless browser was needed. JavaScript rendering carries no multiplier and standard proxy rotation is included. Failed requests cost nothing.

The pricing guide publishes averages of about $0.0001 per scrape and $0.0003 per crawled page, and $0.02 to $0.155 per 1,000 pages across its HTTP, smart and browser modes. Residential proxies are listed at $2 per GB with a 2x to 4x multiplier, and zero data retention bills 2.5x on self-serve accounts. Larger top-ups earn bonus credits: 5 percent at $500, 8 percent at $1,000, 12 percent at $2,000 and 15 percent at $5,000. A separate Unlimited plan sells concurrency instead of bandwidth, from $40 a month for 2 concurrent requests to $350 for 25. Our Spider Cloud pricing breakdown works through every line, including when Unlimited pays for itself.

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. Concurrency runs 5, 25, 50 and 100 requests across the paid tiers.

One credit buys one page from scrape, crawl or map, whatever the page weighs. Search costs 2 credits per 10 results. Asking for JSON output adds 4 credits, so a typed page costs 5. Plan credits reset each period on Hobby, Standard and Growth, and Scale carries unused credits for one month. A page that comes back with a 403 or 404 still costs a credit. The full ladder, including top-up rates, is in our Firecrawl pricing guide.

Spider vs Firecrawl pricing side by side

Is Spider cheaper than Firecrawl?

Spider is cheaper whenever your average page transfers less than about 830 KB, and Firecrawl is cheaper above it. The arithmetic is short. Firecrawl Standard billed yearly is $0.83 per 1,000 pages. At $1 per GB, Spider reaches $0.83 per 1,000 pages when each page weighs 0.83 MB. Compute rarely moves that line, because a ten second browser render is about $0.000017.

Put residential proxies on the Spider side and the crossover drops sharply. At $2 to $4 per GB it falls to somewhere between about 210 KB and 415 KB a page, which most modern retail and media pages exceed. Against Firecrawl billed monthly at $0.99 per 1,000 the crossover rises to roughly 990 KB on standard rotation.

Most documentation sites, blogs and government pages sit well under the line, often around 100 KB of HTML. Retail category pages, news homepages and anything built as a heavy single page app frequently sit well above it.

Four workloads priced on both

Each row states the page weight it assumes. Spider figures are bandwidth plus a small allowance for compute. Firecrawl figures are the plan that covers the credits, yearly and monthly.

The typed row is the one people get wrong. Firecrawl's $83 includes the model. On Spider the extraction itself runs on a model you pay for separately, so the honest comparison is $83 against $2 plus whatever 20,000 extraction calls cost on your own key. For a small model that can be a few dollars. For a large one it can pass Firecrawl.

Why the published Spider figures disagree

Spider's comparison post puts 100,000 pages in smart mode at about $8 to $15, which is roughly $0.08 to $0.15 per 1,000 and implies pages of around 100 KB. Other pages quote $0.03 per 1,000, and third-party directories quote $0.48 to $0.65. None of these is wrong. They are measured on different traffic, and a bandwidth meter makes every one of them true for somebody.

The practical fix takes an afternoon. Crawl a hundred of your most typical URLs on Spider with the mode you would use in production, read the bandwidth on each response, and multiply by your monthly page count. Then add the multiplier for any proxy pool you need. That number is your forecast. The averages are not.

Whichever vendor you pick, a usage meter is a bill that can move on its own when a target site ships a heavier template. It is worth putting a budget alert on vendor spend in place before the first big crawl, so a doubling shows up in a day rather than on the invoice.

Does Firecrawl or Spider charge for failed requests?

Spider does not charge for failed requests at all, according to its pricing page. Firecrawl does not charge when no document comes back, but a page that responds with an error status such as 403 or 404 is still returned and still costs a credit. On a stale URL list or a target that blocks a share of requests, that difference shows up on the bill, and it favors Spider.

Which is better for a fixed monthly budget?

Firecrawl, between these two. A page is a credit whatever it weighs, so pages times credits is the forecast, and the plan price is the ceiling until top-ups start. Spider can be far cheaper and still be harder to approve, because the person signing off needs a page weight before they can see a number.

If the budget has to be fixed and the job is known public sites, a flat page allowance is the third option. Our own plans count one page per page returned, whatever it weighs: $99 a month on Startup for about 250,000 pages, $0.40 per 1,000, or about $0.13 per 1,000 on Scale billed yearly. Schema extraction is included from Startup, up to 900 model-mapped pages a month there and 3,500 on Scale, and pages that already publish the fields as schema.org data are mapped without the model. We have no residential pool, defeat no anti-bot system and run no web search, so for defended targets or search-led agents, buy one of the two vendors above. The cheapest web scraping API comparison ranks the wider field on the same basis.

How to choose between Spider and Firecrawl

• Light pages at very large volume: Spider, often by several times.
• Heavy retail or media pages: Firecrawl, once pages pass about 830 KB.
• Spiky or one-off crawls: Spider, because the balance never expires.
• Typed JSON without managing a model: Firecrawl, at 5 credits a page with the model included.
• Stale URL lists or partly blocked targets: Spider, since failed requests are free.
• A bill finance approves in advance: Firecrawl, or a flat per-page plan such as ours for known public sites.

Test both with your own hundred most typical URLs before you commit, and read the cost of each response rather than the averages. For Firecrawl alternatives priced the same way, see our Olostep vs Firecrawl pricing comparison.