Firecrawl says no API key and 100% free — so where is the ceiling?

Question

Weirdo · Accepted Answer

Free is real, but it is not uncapped. Keyless usage is metered per IP address per day against two separate limits — requests and credits — and crossing either one returns a 429. Firecrawl does not publish those two numbers. The 1,000 credits a month you may have heard about come with a free account, which does mean signing up.

The launch post says no API key and no signup. The documentation agrees on that part: the keyless endpoint exposes Search, Scrape and Parse, and the official CLI, SDKs and REST client add Interact.  The blog's "1,000 free credits a month", though, is the allowance that comes with a free account — the pricing page lists the Free plan as 1,000 credits per month, $0, no credit card. The docs put it plainly: sign up for a free API key to get 1,000 credits and higher rate limits. So "no signup" and "1,000 credits a month" sit at two different thresholds, and reading them in the same breath makes them look like one offer.

Keyless usage is metered per IP address, per day, against two limits at once: a maximum number of requests, and a maximum number of credits. Exceed either and you get a 429.  Credits are not uniform. The docs say Interact and JSON extraction cost more than a plain scrape, so heavier work hits the credit ceiling before it hits the request ceiling.  The part that gets less attention: the documentation never states either number. You know there is a wall; you find out where it is by hitting a 429.

Keyless covers Search, Scrape and Parse, plus Interact on the official clients. Crawl, extract, map and batch scrape all still require a key.  So "100% free" is precise in a narrow way: those few operations are free, within a daily allowance whose size is not disclosed. Crawling a whole site — or simply checking how much of your allowance is left — puts you back in the world that needs an account.

Firecrawl says no API key and 100% free — so where is the ceiling?

"No signup" and "1,000 credits" are two different things

Two ceilings, and neither number is published

What a key is still for