Fastcrawl vs ScrapingBee
ScrapingBee is one of the older scraping APIs — solid, around for years, and broadly trusted. Fastcrawl is newer and built specifically for agent workloads. The two converge on the core job (turn a URL into clean data) but differ in how they price it, what they include and how well they fit an agent loop.
Side by side
| Feature | fastcrawl | ScrapingBee |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 2,000 credits / mo, no card | 1,000 free credits (trial) |
| Paid entry | $5 / mo (Go) for 5,000 credits | $19 / mo (Hobby) for 75,000 credits |
| Cost per 1k calls | $1.00 (Go overage is $0.25/1k) | ~$0.25 (Hobby) at 75,000 / $19 |
| Pricing model | One flat credit, every endpoint | Per-credit, shared across all endpoints |
| Rate limit on paid | None | Concurrency caps per plan |
| MCP server | 12 tools | Not first-class |
| PDF parse | Included | Not offered |
| Monitors | Included (schedule + diff + webhook) | Not built in |
| Free-to-paid ratio (entry) | $5 vs $19 = 3.8× cheaper entry | — |
| JS rendering | Included (auto mode) | Add-on cost per render |
Where Fastcrawl wins
Cheaper entry. Fastcrawl's Go plan is $5/mo for 5,000 credits; ScrapingBee's Hobby tier is $19/mo for 75,000 credits. At equal volume Fastcrawl works out roughly the same per credit, but to get to a 5,000-credit per month run rate on ScrapingBee you're paying $19 a month before you've made a single call. For early projects and small teams, the $5 floor is a meaningful difference.
Predictable, flat pricing. One credit per call, every format. ScrapingBee also has a single credit unit, but JS rendering and premium proxies can stack on top. With Fastcrawl you never add a multiplier for "I want this to actually work on a real site".
No rate limit on paid. Fastcrawl's Go plan has no concurrency cap. ScrapingBee Hobby caps you at 25 concurrent requests. If your agent loops in parallel, the difference shows up quickly.
PDF parse and monitors included. Send a PDF URL to Fastcrawl and get markdown; schedule a re-scrape and get a webhook when content changes. ScrapingBee doesn't ship either out of the box.
Where ScrapingBee wins
Track record and ecosystem. ScrapingBee has been around longer, has more tutorials, more third-party integrations and a bigger Stack Overflow footprint. If "easy to Google" matters, that's a real edge.
Higher concurrency at higher tiers. If you genuinely need 100+ concurrent scrapes, ScrapingBee's Startup and Business tiers push the cap up further than Fastcrawl's current published plan — though Fastcrawl Enterprise will match this.
Which should you pick?
Pick Fastcrawl if you want the cheaper entry, no concurrency cap, a flat per-call model and built-in MCP, monitors and PDF parsing. Most agent projects fit this.
Pick ScrapingBee if your team is already familiar with their docs and SDKs, you need a higher published concurrency cap than Fastcrawl currently offers, or a longer operational history is a hard requirement.
Fastcrawl's free tier is 2,000 credits, no card required.
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