What it costs

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).
• 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

What this leaves out

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.