Context.dev
Web scraping APIs abstract away the hardest parts of web data collection: JavaScript rendering, anti-bot detection, proxy rotation, and data parsing. Instead of building and maintaining your own scraping infrastructure, you send a URL and receive clean, structured data back. For AI applications, many of these APIs now return LLM-ready markdown or structured JSON.
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How Context.dev compares
Frequently asked questions
How much does Context.dev cost?
Context.dev is freemium. Signing up with a work email grants 500 free API credits (250 with a free email provider), no card required. Paid plans are credit-based subscriptions that start at $25 per month and run through published tiers up to Scale 2.5M at $949 per month, with custom Enterprise pricing above 2.5 million credits a month. One credit roughly equals one scraped page, JS rendering and anti-bot handling are included at the standard rate, and failed or blocked requests are not billed. Annual billing saves two months, and startups and nonprofits get 30% off.
Is Context.dev open source?
No. The platform is closed-source hosted SaaS, and the docs contain no self-hosting option. The github.com/context-dot-dev organization publishes client SDKs (TypeScript, Go, and PHP repos are public; the Python package ships on PyPI under Apache-2.0), a Go CLI, and integrations for n8n and Cursor, but none of the public repos contain the platform source. Context.dev's own blog points readers who want self-hosting to Crawl4AI.
How does Context.dev compare to Firecrawl?
Both convert URLs into LLM-ready markdown with full-site crawling, JSON-schema structured extraction, and a search endpoint in one API. Firecrawl is the more established product, with an open-source core, a much larger community, and a longer production track record. Context.dev's differentiator is the bundled brand-intelligence layer (logos, colors, fonts, styleguides, NAICS/SIC classification) that Firecrawl does not offer; its featured case study about SiteGPT switching from Firecrawl is self-published. Pick Firecrawl as the settled default; consider Context.dev when brand enrichment would otherwise mean a second vendor.
What can the Context.dev API do?
The documented endpoint groups cover web scraping (scrape HTML, scrape markdown, scrape images, capture screenshot, search the web, crawl sitemap, and full-site crawls that return clean markdown), extraction (structured data shaped by your JSON schema, product data, and NAICS/SIC industry classification), and brand intelligence (logos, colors, fonts, styleguides, descriptions, and socials, plus a logo CDN). It ships official TypeScript, Python, Go, and PHP SDKs and an MCP server so agent tools like Claude Code and Cursor can call the API directly.
Does Context.dev render JavaScript?
Yes. Context.dev runs a headless browser layer that auto-detects whether a page needs a full render. Rendering, anti-bot bypass, and premium proxies are all part of the standard one-credit-per-page rate, so a JS-heavy page does not cost extra. The company claims it bypasses Cloudflare, DataDome, and PerimeterX and reports a 96%+ first-attempt success rate, but both figures are vendor-reported and have not been independently benchmarked.
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