Firecrawl Cost Tuning

Overview

Reduce Firecrawl web scraping costs by limiting crawl depth, caching scraped content, and choosing the right scrape mode. Firecrawl charges credits per page: 1 credit for single-page scrape, variable credits for crawl jobs (each discovered page costs credits).

Prerequisites

• Firecrawl account with credit balance visibility
• Understanding of your scraping patterns (single page vs crawl)
• Cache infrastructure for storing scraped content

Instructions

Step 1: Always Set Crawl Limits

set -euo pipefail
# BAD: Unbounded crawl (could consume thousands of credits)
curl -X POST https://api.firecrawl.dev/v1/crawl \
  -d '{"url": "https://docs.example.com"}'

# GOOD: Bounded crawl with depth and page limits