Fastcrawl vs Zyte
Zyte API is a mature enterprise web-scraping product that pricesper request by website difficulty — it classifies each site into a tier (Simple to Advanced) and charges accordingly, with browser-rendered requests costing far more than plain HTTP. Fastcrawl is a flat 1 credit per call API for AI agents. This is fundamentally a trade-off between per-site optimization and predictability.
Side by side
| Feature | fastcrawl | Zyte API |
|---|---|---|
| Free tier | 2,000 credits / mo, no card | $5 free trial credit, 30 days, no subscription |
| Paid entry | $5 / mo (Go), 5,000 credits | Pay-as-you-go, no minimum, ~$0.06–1.27/1k HTTP |
| Pricing model | Flat 1 credit per call | Per-1k, by website difficulty tier (1–5) + request type |
| Browser-rendered cost | Included, 1 credit | ~$0.48–16.08 / 1k (difficulty-dependent) |
| Price predictability | One flat rate, every endpoint | Varies by site tier — the same call can cost 5× more |
| Concurrency | None on Go plan | Tiered by commitment |
| MCP server | 12 tools | No first-class MCP |
| Monitors | Included (schedule + diff + webhook) | Not built in |
| PDF parse | Included | Not a dedicated endpoint |
| Contract | No commitment, cancel anytime | $100/$200/$500 monthly commitments for lower rates |
Where Fastcrawl wins
Predictable pricing. Fastcrawl charges 1 credit per call — every endpoint, every URL, regardless of how hard the site is. Zyte prices by difficulty tier, so the same call can range from $0.06 to $1.27 per 1k (HTTP) or$0.48 to $16.08 per 1k (browser-rendered) depending only on how they classify the site. For an agent loop, unpredictable per-site pricing is real budget risk.
Cheaper entry and browser-rendered. Fastcrawl's $5 Go plan includes JS rendering at no extra cost. Zyte's browser-rendered requests on tough sites can hit$16.08 per 1k — 64× Fastcrawl's flat $0.25/1k overage ceiling. If your workload leans on harder, JS-heavy pages, the flat model is dramatically cheaper.
Agent-native with monitors. Fastcrawl ships an MCP server (12 tools), scheduled monitors, and PDF parsing as first-class features. Zyte is built around proxy and extraction infrastructure, not agent tooling.
Where Zyte wins
Per-site anti-bot optimization. Zyte automatically selects the best proxy and technique per website — it's engineered for the toughest blocks and bans. If your targets are heavily bot-protected and you need maximum success rate, Zyte's specialized engine beats a general-purpose scraper.
Cheaper on simple static pages. For a tier-1 Simple site, Zyte's$0.06/1k HTTP rate is well under Fastcrawl's $0.25/1k overage. A high-volume, all-simple-fetch workload works out cheaper per request.
Enterprise scale and support. Committed tiers ($100/$200/$500+/mo), SLAs, compliance assessments, and a dedicated success team. If scraping is mission-critical infrastructure, Zyte is built for that.
Which should you pick?
Pick Fastcrawl if you want a flat, predictable, cheap API for an AI agent — one credit per call, JS rendering included, monitors + MCP built in, $5 to start. If you value budget certainty over per-site optimization, this is the fit.
Pick Zyte if you're an enterprise running high-volume scraping of hard-to-get, bot-protected targets, need maximum success rate, and can absorb commitment-based pricing. For tough anti-bot work at scale, their engine is purpose-built.
Fastcrawl is not a proxy vendor, so for heavily bot-protected targets you might pair us with a proxy or use Zyte. For typical agent page-reading, the flat model is simpler and cheaper.
Fastcrawl's free tier is 2,000 credits, no card required.
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