Firecrawl alternative

Why people look for a Firecrawl alternative

The searches around “firecrawl alternative” are consistent: a free or cheaper option, something that works with Claude, Cursor or n8n, an MCP server, and a bill that does not surprise. Those are the four things this page is about. We do not rank vendors or quote their prices; Firecrawl publishes its own, and it is a capable product with an open-source core you can self-host, a hosted cloud with credit-based plans and a popular MCP server and SDKs.

What QuanticData does differently

• Pay per success, no subscription. A blocked page, a timeout or a retry is never billed. There is no monthly plan to size: pay-as-you-go at list price, or a paid account for a discount and a higher rate limit.
• Public unit prices. Scraping is $0.0002 per successful page as Markdown, HTML, text or structured JSON, $0.001 with JavaScript rendering, with CSS or AI extraction in the same call. Batch up to 1,000 URLs per job, crawl up to 500 pages per job at $0.0003 each with unfetched pages refunded.
• $2 free every month, no card. Every permanent email address renews with $2 of credit: roughly 10,000 scraped pages or 4,000 searches. Residential proxies add a free 100 MB trial.
• Proxies and APIs on one account. The residential, mobile, datacenter, ISP and IPv6 networks are the same infrastructure the APIs run on, and you can use them directly with country targeting included.
• Built for agents. Markdown output, a JSON envelope on every call, twin .md pages, llms.txt, and an MCP server that exposes every endpoint as a tool.
• Collectors instead of URLs. For the common targets, you send a keyword, a place or a product id and get typed rows, billed per delivered row.

Same job, one request

curl -X POST "https://api.quanticdata.io/v1/scrape" \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer qd_live_YOUR_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://example.com", "format": "markdown"}'

Add "render": true for JavaScript pages, "extract" with CSS selectors or a JSON schema for structured output, or switch the endpoint to /v1/serp, /v1/crawl, /v1/batch. Every endpoint with a working example: Python, Node, curl, PHP.

When Firecrawl is the better fit

You want to self-host the scraper on your own infrastructure, or you are already building on its SDKs and open-source codebase. Switching tools has a cost, and a bill that is already predictable is not a reason to switch. Try the free tier on the pages that matter to you and compare the results, not the marketing.

How to compare fairly

1. Take 100 URLs from your real targets, including the protected ones.
2. Fetch them through both services with the same options (rendering on or off) and count usable results, not HTTP 200s.
3. Divide what you paid by the usable results. Per-success billing makes that number the price; credit billing makes it a calculation.
4. Check what the output needs before your parser can use it. Markdown that is already clean saves a step per page.