DreamScrape vs Firecrawl
We cost $0.09 per 1,000 pages on HTTP sites. Firecrawl charges $5.33.
The price gap exists because Firecrawl charges one flat rate for every request — browser or not. DreamScrape charges by engine tier: 1 credit for HTTP, 3 for stealth browser, 10 for anti-detect Firefox. The math flips in our favor on every realistic scraping mix above 5,000 pages per month.
Last verified against Firecrawl public pricing: 2026-05-07. If their pricing has changed, tell us and we'll update this page.
Pricing head-to-head
| Workload | Firecrawl | DreamScrape | You save |
|---|---|---|---|
HTTP-only sites (docs, wikis, blogs) ~50% of most scraping mixes | $5.33 per 1,000 | $0.09 per 1,000 (Lite plan) | 98% |
JA4-scrapeable (Cloudflare Bot Fight Mode) ~25% of mixes, curl_cffi gets through | $5.33 per 1,000 | $0.38 per 1,000 (Starter) | 93% |
Stealth browser (Managed Challenge) ~20% of mixes, needs real Chromium | $5.33 per 1,000 | $1.14 per 1,000 (Starter) | 79% |
Camoufox (DataDome, strict Akamai) ~5% of mixes, hardest sites | Not available | $3.80 per 1,000 (Starter) | Firecrawl can't |
Firecrawl's flat rate means you overpay by 50x on HTTP sites and underpay on Camoufox-class sites (where they don't offer the engine at all). A typical mixed workload — 60% HTTP, 25% JA4, 10% stealth, 5% Camoufox — costs $0.28 per 1,000 pages on our Starter plan vs $5.33 at Firecrawl.
Routing behavior
Firecrawl
- ·You pick the engine per request via the
formatsparameter. - ·Stealth mode is an opt-in flag — you either pay for it or you don't get it.
- ·No built-in memory of which engine worked for which domain last time.
- ·If you pick the wrong engine, you pay for the failure and retry at the correct tier.
DreamScrape
- ·The router tries the cheapest engine first by default.
- ·On failure, it escalates to the next tier automatically and writes the outcome to Postgres.
- ·Next request to the same domain skips straight to the last-working engine.
- ·You can still force an engine when you know better. The default just saves you from having to know.
Where Firecrawl wins
Firecrawl raised $26M and has more engineering-hours invested in their product. Specific wins:
- Brand trust at the enterprise procurement layer. If you're pitching a scraping-adjacent tool to a Fortune 500 and need a vendor their procurement team has already heard of, Firecrawl has more name recognition. We're four months old.
- Simpler pricing for <1,000 pages/month. Their $10 Hobby plan at flat $0.005 per page is easier to budget than our credit system for true light users. Above 5,000 pages the math flips hard in our favor, but below that the convenience has real value.
- Managed crawl scheduling. Firecrawl includes scheduled recurring crawls. We don't; we recommend you run a scheduler in your own service and call
/scrape. Most production users already have a scheduler they'd rather use.
Feature matrix
| Feature | Firecrawl | DreamScrape |
|---|---|---|
| HTTP fetch | ✓ | ✓ |
| JA4 TLS impersonation (curl_cffi) | — | ✓ |
| Stealth Playwright | ✓ | ✓ |
| Camoufox anti-detect Firefox | — | ✓ |
| Auto engine routing | — | ✓ |
| API Discovery (JSON endpoint replay) | — | ✓ |
| Tier Race (fire all engines in parallel) | — | ✓ |
| Public intel database of 124+ domains | — | ✓ |
| Public scorecard with pass/fail rates | — | ✓ |
| Residential proxy pool | ✓ | ✓ |
| CAPTCHA solver | ✓ | ✓ (surcharge) |
| Async job + webhook delivery | ✓ | ✓ |
| Markdown + HTML + screenshot output | ✓ | ✓ |
| MCP server for Claude Code / Codex | ✓ | ✓ |
| Recurring crawl scheduling | ✓ | — (bring your own scheduler) |
| Free tier | 500 pages/mo | 2,000 credits/mo (4,000 with HN code) |
Migration, if you want it
The APIs are close enough that most migrations are under 50 lines of code. Firecrawl's /scrape maps to ours; their /crawl maps to ours. Parameter names differ — Firecrawl uses formats: ['markdown', 'html']; we use includeHtml: true and return markdown by default.
We publish a line-by-line migration guide at /docs/migrations/firecrawl. If your team wants a 20-minute pair session on migration, email us — we do these for free for Pro-plan signups.
Try it on your hardest site
The playground lets you scrape 10 real URLs without signing up. Paste a site Firecrawl struggles with and watch which tier wins.