Firecrawl Has a Free Web Scraping API — Turn Any Website into LLM-Ready Data

#webscraping #data #api #ai

Firecrawl is an API that scrapes websites and converts them into clean markdown for LLM consumption.

What You Get for Free

500 credits/month — free tier, no credit card
Scrape — any URL → clean markdown, no HTML parsing needed
Crawl — follow links, scrape entire sites
Map — discover all URLs on a domain
Extract — structured data extraction with LLM
Screenshot — capture page screenshots
JavaScript rendering — handles SPAs, dynamic content
Anti-bot bypass — rotates proxies, handles Cloudflare
Self-hosted — free, unlimited credits

Quick Start

pip install firecrawl-py

from firecrawl import FirecrawlApp

app = FirecrawlApp(api_key="fc-your-key")

# Scrape a single page → clean markdown
result = app.scrape_url("https://example.com")
print(result.markdown)  # Clean text, no HTML

# Crawl entire site
crawl = app.crawl_url("https://docs.example.com", limit=100)
# Returns markdown for every page

# Extract structured data
data = app.scrape_url("https://example.com/pricing", {
    'formats': ['extract'],
    'extract': {'schema': {'plans': [{'name': 'string', 'price': 'number'}]}}
})

Why AI Developers Need It

Building RAG apps? You need clean data:

No HTML parsing — get markdown directly, feed to LLM
JavaScript rendering — BeautifulSoup can't handle SPAs
Anti-bot — requests library gets blocked by Cloudflare
Structured extraction — pull specific data with schemas

An AI startup was spending 3 weeks building custom scrapers for each data source. With Firecrawl, they scrape any site in one API call — their RAG pipeline went from 20 custom scrapers to 20 lines of code.