ScrapePay vs Firecrawl
Both are web-scraping APIs for AI agents. ScrapePay is x402-native pay-per-call, no signup. Firecrawl is account-based with subscription tiers. Use this page to pick the right one for your workload — honest tradeoffs, not marketing copy.
At a glance
| ScrapePay | Firecrawl | |
|---|---|---|
| Signup required | No — wallet address is your identity | Yes — account + API key |
| Pricing model | $0.010 USDC per successful call | Subscription tiers ($16–$333/mo) + credit-based |
| Charge-on-failure | Never — settlement only on HTTP 2xx with non-empty content | Credits consumed regardless of outcome on most plans |
| robots.txt enforcement | Mandatory — 451 with no charge if disallowed | Optional / user-configurable |
| SSRF guard | Built in: DNS validation + private-IP blocklist | Built in |
| JS rendering | Playwright headless Chromium | Playwright + chromium fleet |
| Scale ceiling | Pay-per-call linear scale; no published rate cap | Higher concurrency on paid tiers |
| MCP integration | Native via @melis-ai/x402-tools-mcp | Via community wrappers |
| Output formats | text · html · markdown | markdown · html · structured · screenshots |
| Composability | Designed to chain with MarkdownOpt, EmbedPay, MemoryServe | Standalone |
Choose ScrapePay when
- You don't want to manage an API key in your agent runtime.
- Low or unpredictable volume — pay-per-call beats a subscription you might not amortise.
- Charge-on-success matters — failed scrapes (JS crash, timeout, empty page, robots.txt disallow) cost nothing.
- You're building a composed pipeline (RAG ingest, content moderation, agent memory) and want each step independently billed and verifiable on-chain.
- Your agent operates across multiple users/orgs and account-per-customer isn't workable.
Choose Firecrawl when
- High and predictable volume — the $333/mo tier is cheaper per-call than ScrapePay above ~3,300 calls/day.
- You need its specialised features — structured extraction, deep-crawl, screenshot bundles, content change tracking — at production polish.
- Your stack is account-and-key-shaped and adding a Base wallet would be more friction than just provisioning a key.
- You want a polished dashboard for billing, usage analytics, and rate-limit visibility.
When both make sense
Some teams use ScrapePay for the long tail (one-off URLs, agent-spawned scrapes, unknown-volume workloads) and Firecrawl for the hot path (their main product's scraping budget). The x402 protocol makes it trivial to swap between providers per-call — different agents in the same workflow can use different scrape backends.
What we won't claim
- ScrapePay is not faster than Firecrawl at p99 — Firecrawl's hot fleet handles burst traffic better.
- ScrapePay's output quality on JS-heavy pages is comparable but not provably superior — both use Playwright.
- ScrapePay does not handle deep crawls (multi-page sitemaps) natively — Firecrawl does.
For pages where ScrapePay's UA is blocked by the upstream (some CDNs and a few large news sites), ScrapePay returns 422 with no charge. Falling back to Firecrawl or a different scraper at that point is the right move.
Try it
ScrapePay one-liner: npx @melis-ai/x402-tools-mcp then call the
scrapepay tool from your agent. Full details on the
ScrapePay page or the
5-minute getting-started guide.