Firecrawl alternative for anti-bot bypass in 2026

One price for every page, with no monthly plan

Firecrawl does not charge more for its enhanced proxies: its billing page puts that request at the same 1 credit as a basic one, and an escalated retry is not charged separately. The price of a page is the plan price over its credits: $3.80 per 1,000 on Hobby and $0.99 on Standard. Growth and Scale reach $0.80 and $0.75 when every credit of a $399 or $749 month is used, and the allotment resets each cycle.

On SpecStream every page with text is $0.80 per 1,000 from the first page, with no plan and no allotment to use up. 10,000 protected pages cost $8, and the credit you buy never expires.

An error page costs nothing and stays out of your parser

Firecrawl bills a page that comes back with an error status such as 403 Forbidden or 404 Not Found, and asks you to check metadata.statusCode to spot them. On a site behind a bot check, those pages are billed and land in your pipeline as documents.

SpecStream tries a refused page again as a browser would ask, then in a real browser, then from the site's own feed, then from its newest public archive capture, at $0.0008 whichever step reads it. A page none of them reads comes back from /v2/scrape as success: false and is not charged. A bot check's page is never returned as text, and a 404 is not charged either. The Extract API scores 0.908 F1 on WCXB, and its own reply says where each page was read from in read_from.

What the published tests say

ZenRows tested Firecrawl's /scrape on default settings on June 1, 2026: 100 requests to each of 7 sites at 2 a second. Firecrawl averaged 85.28%, and LinkedIn blocked all 100 requests. That is one vendor's test of its rival, on 7 sites. The test that decides is yours, on the URLs that fail for you today.

Test it on your hardest URLs

Put the URLs Firecrawl fails on in hard.txt. This script sends each one to Firecrawl and to SpecStream with the same /v2/scrape body and prints, for each, how many pages were read, how many came back as error pages, and how many gave no page.

import collections
import os

import requests

APIS = {
    "Firecrawl": ("https://api.firecrawl.dev", os.environ["FIRECRAWL_API_KEY"]),
    "SpecStream": ("https://api.specstream.ai/firecrawl", os.environ["SPECSTREAM_API_KEY"]),
}
urls = [line.strip() for line in open("hard.txt") if line.strip()]

for name, (base, key) in APIS.items():
    seen = collections.Counter()
    for url in urls:
        body = requests.post(
            f"{base}/v2/scrape",
            headers={"Authorization": f"Bearer {key}"},
            json={"url": url, "formats": ["markdown"]},
            timeout=120,
        ).json()
        if not body.get("success"):
            seen["no page, not charged"] += 1
        elif body["data"]["metadata"].get("statusCode", 200) >= 400:
            seen["error page, charged"] += 1
        else:
            seen["page read, charged"] += 1
    print(name, dict(seen))

On SpecStream each page read costs $0.0008 and the rest cost nothing. On Firecrawl the first two counts are billed at 1 credit each.

Search, pages and rows on one key

The same key answers Firecrawl's /v2/search at $1 per 1,000 searches of up to 10 results, and runs the Search API: 97.9 F-score on all 1,000 SimpleQA Verified questions and 64.0 item F1 on all 200 WideSearch tasks (benchmarks). Deep Search turns a request in plain words into structured rows at 5¢, 15¢ or $1 a delivered row, with the source URL on every value.

SpecStream

The live web data engine for teams and agents. It answers your Firecrawl calls at https://api.specstream.ai/firecrawl, reads protected and plain pages at $0.80 per 1,000, and does not charge a blocked page. The same balance runs search, pages and rows, and new accounts get $10 of credit, no card.

ZenRows

A protected request takes 25 credits on every plan, so Build B1's 45,000 credits read 1,800 protected pages for $19, and unused credits expire at every renewal. Your Firecrawl calls move to its own API. SpecStream answers ZenRows' API too, at https://api.specstream.ai/zenrows/v1/, at $0.0008 a page (ZenRows compatible).

Scrapfly

Discovery is $30 a month for 200,000 credits, $0.15 per 1,000 credits. Residential proxies take 25 credits and a browser 5 more, and failed scrapes are billed once 30% of a day's scrapes are blocked without the Unblocker. SpecStream never bills a blocked page, and answers Scrapfly's /scrape at /scrapfly/scrape (Scrapfly compatible).

Scrape.do

Hobby is $29 a month for 250,000 credits. Residential and mobile proxies with a browser take 25 credits, some domains get them turned on by default, and 400, 404 and 410 replies count as successful. SpecStream has one price whatever the domain and answers Scrape.do's API at /scrapedo (Scrape.do compatible).