Agents that need scrape/search/crawl tools over one shared credit balance
Small recurring website ingestion with a published free monthly allowance
WHEN TO RECONSIDER
Find the actual friction
Advanced formats and browser interaction consume more credits than a basic page scrape; search and monitor have different meters.
Unused included credits on Hobby, Standard and Growth do not roll over; paid-plan pay-as-you-go can add $5 credit increments unless capped or disabled.
START WITH THE CHANGE YOU NEED
Three routes worth comparing
Scrapfly
Keep a managed extraction API
Firecrawl supplies managed scrape, map, search, crawl and browser Interact tools, while Scrapfly centers a feature-dependent Scrape API with MCP and separately documented Cloud Browser. Both charge credits, but a site-discovery operation and a protected rendered page draw different features and units.
Before you switch
Skip this route if your application needs a reusable proxy address rather than an API response.
Bright Data offers raw proxy zones, Unlocker, Browser API and selectable MCP tool groups. Firecrawl combines scrape, search, crawl and browser interaction under a web-data credit balance and official MCP tools. Choose the product that completes the task before comparing a proxy GB with page credits.
Before you switch
Confirm the returned format and the cost of a complete crawl, not only one successful page.
DataImpulse's residential, mobile and datacenter traffic is prepaid by GB without a required subscription or stated expiry. Firecrawl's managed scrape, crawl, search and MCP tools draw from credits, with different units for page and browser work. Idle periods affect the two purchases differently.
Before you switch
Choose a raw proxy only if your team can maintain fetching, retries and extraction.
The free tier refreshes 1,000 credits monthly. Paid plans include monthly credits, with pay-as-you-go top-ups in $5 increments under a configurable limit. Basic scrape/crawl/map costs one credit per page; search costs two per ten results, browser Interact two per minute, and structured formats can add credits. Included-credit rollover depends on plan.
Write down the last issue that made you consider switching. If it was a bill, compare the minimum commitment and expiry rules for the same monthly volume. If it was incomplete data, compare a proxy connection with a managed scraping API. If it was engineering time, count the browser maintenance and parsing work you would still own after switching.
Send authorized requests to Firecrawl's Scrape/Crawl/Search endpoints or configure the official MCP server with an API key via the hosted URL or local FIRECRAWL_API_KEY environment variable. Choose basic Markdown or higher-credit structured/browser modes per job.
Keep one small job on the current provider while you evaluate the replacement. Preserve the same target sample and required output so you can identify what improved.