# What it costs

Cost per thousand correct pages, Frankensurf against Firecrawl's plans, from our benchmark runs and Firecrawl's published prices.

A scraping API charges for every page it fetches, right or wrong. Frankensurf's free tools charge
nothing: no per-page fee, no plan, no credits. They run on your own machine, and a cheap one is
enough. You only pay a paid tool for the pages the free ones can't get, and only if you turn paid
tools on.

## Per 1,000 correct pages

| | Pages read correctly | Per 1,000 pages | Per 1,000 correct pages |
| --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Firecrawl, Hobby ($16/mo, 5k pages) | 84.7% | $3.20 | $3.78 |
| Firecrawl, Standard ($83/mo, 100k) | 84.7% | $0.83 | $0.98 |
| Firecrawl, Scale ($599/mo, 1M) | 84.7% | $0.60 | $0.71 |
| **Frankensurf, free tools** | 87–88% | **$0** in fees; about $0.01 of a $5/month server | **about $0.01** |
| **Frankensurf with paid fallbacks** (Firecrawl at the Standard rate) | 96.0% | $0.21 | **$0.22** |

Free tools read more pages correctly than Firecrawl on its own, for close to nothing. With paid
fallbacks, Frankensurf reads 96% of pages instead of 85% for about a third of Firecrawl's best
rate, because it only pays on the quarter of pages that are walled.

## Where the numbers come from

- **Pages read correctly:** held-out set 7, 150 sites picked before any was read, every tool alone
  and Frankensurf, graded by the same check
  ([rows](https://github.com/yail259/frankensurf/tree/main/benchmarks/2026-10-11)).
- **Firecrawl:** its pricing page on 16 October 2026, billed yearly: 1 credit for a basic page
  scrape. A page that comes back 403 or 404 still costs a credit; JSON extraction adds 4 credits a
  page; monthly credits don't roll over below Scale.
- **Frankensurf on a small server:** the same 150 sites in free mode, from a fresh state (no learned
  routes), pinned to 2 CPU cores, four reads at a time: 820 seconds, about 660 pages an hour, or
  roughly 480,000 a month, 131 of 150 read correctly. 107 of the 150 came back from plain HTTP or Jina
  Reader with no browser at all. A 2 vCPU server costs about $5 a month (Hetzner CX22 class), so
  about $0.01 per 1,000 pages. On a machine you already run, nothing.
- **With paid fallbacks:** 37 of 150 reads spent anything, one Firecrawl credit each, on pages the
  free tools couldn't get. At Firecrawl's Standard rate that is $0.20 per 1,000 pages, plus the server.

## At a million pages a month

| | Monthly cost | Correct pages |
| --- | --- | --- |
| Firecrawl Scale | $599 | about 847,000 |
| Frankensurf, free tools | about $10 (two small servers) | about 875,000 |
| Frankensurf with paid fallbacks | about $345 (two small servers, and Firecrawl Growth for about 247,000 fallback credits) | about 960,000 |

  Firecrawl runs the machines for you; Frankensurf runs on yours, so someone looks after them.
  Walled pages are slower through Frankensurf (a median of 3 to 10 seconds a page, depending on the
  machine, against Firecrawl's 4.6), so a big job runs more reads at a time. The 2-core run had more
  memory than a 4 GB server; browsers want about 1 GB each, so keep reads at a time near the
  memory you have. Six of its reads went through Steel. And these are basic page reads: Firecrawl's
  extraction and Frankensurf's structured fields aren't priced the same way.