Firecrawl vs Apify vs Bright Data in 2026: Scraping 100,000 Pages a Month for an AI Pipeline Costs $99 on Firecrawl, $150 on Apify and $150 on Bright Data

By Aimee Voss·7 min read·Published Oct 12, 2026·Updated Oct 11, 2026

Prices verified 10 October 2026 on each vendor’s own pricing page or price document, with monthly billing selected and no sign-up promotion applied. Totals are our arithmetic on those list prices, in US dollars, before tax.

Our pick means we earn a commission if you subscribe through our link. Firecrawl is our pick on this page. That does not change any score: Firecrawl scores 7.7 and Bright Data scores 7.9 on our published rubric, and every score below is printed unchanged.

The short answer

For an AI team that turns 100,000 web pages a month into Markdown for a RAG index or an agent, Firecrawl Our pick Standard costs $99 a month. The same 100,000 pages cost $150 through Apify‘s Web Fetch Actor on the Starter plan, and $150 on Bright Data‘s Web Unlocker at pay-as-you-go rates. That is $51 a month, or $612 a year, kept by picking the right meter.

The answer changes with volume, so here is the whole map. Firecrawl is the cheaper of the three from 67,000 to 138,000 pages a month and again from 320,000 up to the 1,000,000 we priced. Apify’s Scale plan is cheaper from 141,000 to 319,000. From 6,000 to 65,000 pages Firecrawl costs more than both: Apify and Bright Data come to $1.50 per 1,000 there, Apify with a $19 floor. Firecrawl also bills 1 credit for a page that answers 403 or 404, where Apify’s Web Fetch and Bright Data’s Unlocker bill only successful requests.

Start on Firecrawl’s free plan (1,000 pages a month, no card)

Pages a month	Firecrawl Our pick	Apify Web Fetch	Bright Data Unlocker	Cheaper
10,000	$44 (Hobby $19 + 5 top-ups of $5)	$19 (Starter, $15 of fetches)	$15 (pay as you go)	Bright Data
50,000	$99 (Standard)	$75 (Starter)	$75 (pay as you go)	Apify or Bright Data
100,000	$99 (Standard)	$150 (Starter)	$150 (pay as you go)	Firecrawl
250,000	$399 (Growth)	$312.50 (Scale)	$375 (pay as you go)	Apify
500,000	$399 (Growth)	$625 (Scale)	$651.10 (Scale $499 + 117,000 at $1.30 per 1,000)	Firecrawl
1,000,000	$749 (Scale)	$1,000 (Business)	$1,109 (Crawl API $999 plan + 100,000 at $1.10 per 1,000)	Firecrawl

One page scraped to Markdown = 1 Firecrawl credit, 1 Apify Web Fetch event, 1 Bright Data request. Monthly billing, list prices read 10 October 2026. Bright Data’s free 5,000 requests a month are not subtracted; if your account keeps them, take $7.50 off its pay-as-you-go totals.

How each vendor meters a page

Firecrawl sells credits in plans. Scrape and crawl cost 1 credit per page, JSON-format extraction adds 4 more, search costs 2 credits per 10 results, and a browser session costs 2 credits a minute. Plans: Free 1,000 credits, Hobby $19 for 5,000, Standard $99 for 100,000, Growth $399 for 500,000 and Scale $749 for 1,000,000. When credits run out, pay-as-you-go adds them in $5 steps: 1,000 credits on Hobby, 2,000 on Standard, 2,500 on Growth and 5,000 on Scale, up to a monthly cap you set. Credits roll over only on Scale (one month) and Enterprise.

Apify sells a monthly plan that is also prepaid usage: Starter $19 includes $19 to spend, Scale $199 includes $199 and Business $999 includes $999, and usage past that is billed as you go. Unused usage expires at the end of the cycle. The Web Fetch Actor converts a page to Markdown, text or HTML, renders JavaScript and works around bot blocking. It charges $0.0015 per successful fetch on Free and Starter, $0.00125 on Scale and $0.001 on Business, plus an Actor Start event of $0.00005 per GB of memory per run, which we left out as a rounding error. Its Store listing data marks platform usage as not billed to the user. Apify’s other crawler, Website Content Crawler, is billed by compute instead; Apify estimates $0.5 to $5 per 1,000 pages with a headless browser.

Bright Data sells requests. The Web Unlocker API has a free tier of 5,000 requests a month with no card, pay-as-you-go at $1.50 per 1,000 with spend limits, and a $499 Scale plan that includes 383,000 requests and charges $1.30 per 1,000 after that. It returns Markdown when you set data_format to markdown, and its docs say only successful requests are billed unless you switch on custom Unlocker features, in which case every request is. The Crawl API, which outputs NDJSON or CSV, has volume plans: 900,000 requests for $999 and 2,000,000 for $1,999.

Firecrawl Our pick: the flat bill for 67,000 to 138,000 pages, and for 320,000 up

A team on Standard pays $99 for 100,000 pages with 25 concurrent browsers; on annual billing it is $83 a month, $990 a year. Growth at $399 covers 500,000 pages with 50 concurrent browsers, and Scale at $749 covers 1,000,000 with 100. SOC 2 Type II and PII redaction are on every plan; zero data retention is Enterprise only. The engine is open source under AGPL-3.0, so a team can also self-host it.

Watch for: JSON extraction costs 5 credits a page, so 100,000 structured pages need 500,000 credits, which is the $399 Growth plan rather than Standard. A 403 or 404 page still costs a credit; a scrape that returns nothing does not. Between 141,000 and 319,000 pages, Standard plus top-ups costs more than Apify Scale, so a team in that band should either commit to Growth for headroom or price Apify.

Verdict: the cheaper meter at 100,000 pages and above 320,000 for teams that want Markdown from arbitrary URLs. Full review: Firecrawl review and pricing. Try Firecrawl free.

Apify: $1.50 per 1,000 at small volume, and the Scale plan from 141,000 pages

Apify is a marketplace of ready-made scrapers called Actors as much as a fetch API, which matters when you need data from one named site that already has an Actor. For generic page-to-Markdown work, Web Fetch on Starter costs the same $1.50 per 1,000 as Bright Data once you pass Starter’s $19 floor, and on Scale the per-fetch rate drops to $0.00125, which is why Apify takes the 141,000 to 319,000 band. Residential proxies, if an Actor needs them, are $8 per GB on Starter and $7.50 on Scale. Score 4.2.

Bright Data: the small-volume and hard-site option

Bright Data‘s Unlocker is built for sites that block scrapers: its pricing page lists automated CAPTCHA solving, retries and unlimited concurrency, and you pay only for successful requests. That makes it the cheaper of the three from 4,000 to 12,000 pages a month and a safer bet when a large share of your targets fight back. Above 383,000 requests its plans cost more per page than Firecrawl’s. Its sign-up offer matches a first deposit up to $500; we left that out of every figure. Score 7.9, the highest of the four tools here.

Crawl4AI: $0 in license fees if you run it yourself

Crawl4AI is an open-source crawler under the Apache-2.0 licence that turns pages into LLM-ready Markdown on your own machine or in Docker, with no key. Your cost is the server and the blocking you handle yourself. Its hosted cloud is in a soft launch whose README says prices can change, so we did not price it. For more self-hosted options, see our open-source web scraper comparison. Score 7.7.

Which one for which team

RAG or agent pipeline reading 67,000 to 138,000 pages a month, or more than 320,000: Firecrawl. $99 for 100,000, $399 for 500,000. Try Firecrawl free.
Under 13,000 pages a month, or targets that block scrapers: Bright Data Unlocker, $1.50 per 1,000, success only.
141,000 to 319,000 pages, or one site with a ready-made Actor: Apify Scale, $199 including $199 of usage.
An engineering team with servers and no per-page budget: Crawl4AI, self-hosted.

If your agent reaches the web through MCP rather than an API call, the same vendors are priced as MCP servers in our MCP servers for web scraping comparison.

How we checked

We read Firecrawl’s pricing from its machine-readable price document (pricing.md), Apify’s plans from its pricing page rendered with the monthly and annual toggles, the Web Fetch price list from the pricing data embedded in its Store listing, and Bright Data’s Web Unlocker and Crawl API prices from its pricing pages and documentation, all on 10 October 2026. The volume table and the crossover bands are our arithmetic in 1,000-page steps on monthly list prices. We did not benchmark speed or success rates for this article, so no such claim appears here. Scores are our published rubric’s numbers, unchanged.

Questions people ask about Firecrawl, Apify and Bright Data

Firecrawl vs Apify: which costs less?

It depends on volume. At 100,000 pages a month Firecrawl Standard is $99 and Apify Web Fetch is $150. Between 141,000 and 319,000 pages Apify Scale costs less, and from 6,000 to 65,000 pages Apify Starter costs less. Prices read 10 October 2026.

Apify vs Bright Data: what is the difference?

Apify is a platform of ready-made scrapers billed as prepaid usage; Bright Data sells unblocking and proxies billed per successful request. For generic pages both cost $1.50 per 1,000 on entry plans; Apify drops to $1.25 on its $199 Scale plan.

Is Firecrawl free?

Firecrawl’s Free plan gives 1,000 credits a month, about 1,000 pages, with no card. Pay-as-you-go top-ups need a paid plan; Hobby starts at $19 a month for 5,000 credits.

Is there an open-source alternative to Firecrawl?

Crawl4AI is open source under Apache-2.0 and runs on your own machine or in Docker with no key. Firecrawl’s own engine is also open source, under AGPL-3.0.

Does Firecrawl charge for failed requests?

A scrape that returns no result is not charged, but a page that answers 403 or 404 costs 1 credit. Apify’s Web Fetch and Bright Data’s Unlocker charge only successful requests.

How much does Bright Data cost per 1,000 pages?

Web Unlocker pay-as-you-go is $1.50 per 1,000 successful requests. A free tier of 5,000 requests a month is listed as a separate plan. The $499 Scale plan includes 383,000 requests, and the Crawl API’s $1,999 plan brings the rate to $1 per 1,000.

What does Firecrawl JSON extraction cost?

JSON format adds 4 credits to the 1 credit per page, so 5 credits a page. 100,000 structured pages need 500,000 credits, the $399 Growth plan.

Sources

Firecrawl pricing document, read 10 October 2026.
Apify pricing, read 10 October 2026.
Apify Web Fetch Actor, read 10 October 2026.
Apify Website Content Crawler, read 10 October 2026.
Bright Data Web Unlocker pricing, read 10 October 2026.
Bright Data Crawl API pricing, read 10 October 2026.
Bright Data Web Unlocker features documentation, read 10 October 2026.
Crawl4AI repository and Firecrawl repository, read 10 October 2026.
Reddit threads comparing these tools: r/LocalLLaMA, r/AgentsOfAI, r/webdev.