Fastcrawl vs the other scraping APIs
If you're picking a web-data API for an AI agent, you're usually choosing between four or five serious options. They're not interchangeable — they solve overlapping but different jobs. These pages break each one down honestly, including the cases where you should pick the competitor instead of us.
The short version
The market splits into two groups. Search-first APIs take a query and return results (Exa, Tavily, SearchAPI). Fetch-first APIs take a URL and render it (Firecrawl, Jina, Fastcrawl). We sit in the second group — so our closest head-to-head is Firecrawl, with Jina as the lightweight alternative.
The single biggest difference across all of them is predictability. Most competitors meter per endpoint, stack add-ons, or bill by token — so your bill depends on details you can't see upfront. Fastcrawl charges one flat credit per call for every format.
Pick a comparison
Fastcrawl vs Firecrawl
The closest feature-for-feature competitor. Bigger brand, 4× the entry price.
Their edge: Browser-interact and agent control, 500k+ credit scale tiers, larger team.
Our edge: 4× cheaper entry ($5 vs $19), 2× the free credits, no rate limit on paid.
Read the comparison →Fastcrawl vs Jina Reader
The zero-friction option — prepend r.jina.ai to any URL. Token-metered pricing.
Their edge: No signup needed for casual use, generous 10M-token free tier.
Our edge: Predictable per-call pricing (Jina varies by tokens), plus crawl, PDF, screenshot and monitors.
Read the comparison →Fastcrawl vs Tavily
Built for agent RAG pipelines. Full-featured search, thinner on scraping.
Their edge: Purpose-built research endpoint and agent-first design.
Our edge: A complete scraping pipeline — crawl, PDF parse, screenshots — that Tavily doesn't offer, at 6× cheaper entry.
Read the comparison →Fastcrawl vs Exa
Neural/semantic search. Genuinely best-in-class retrieval — we don't match it.
Their edge: Semantic search quality that keyword search can't replicate.
Our edge: Predictable pricing with no add-on stacking, plus PDF parse, screenshots and monitors.
Read the comparison →What "one flat credit" actually means
Every endpoint — scrape, crawl, map, search, extract, screenshot, PDF, parse — costs one credit. A crawl of 100 pages costs 100 credits. Not 100 × a multiplier, not a token count that varies with the page. Failed requests are never charged. Overage on the $5 Go plan is metered at $0.25 per 1,000 credits, and you can turn it off entirely for a hard cap.
Compare that to token-metered pricing (the same URL can cost different amounts depending on the day's content) or per-endpoint multipliers (search costs 2 credits, browser-interact costs 2 per minute). If you're running an agent loop, predictability is worth more than a marginally lower headline rate.