How much does Crawlbase cost?
Crawlbase uses one graduated rate card per 1,000 successful standard requests: $3 for the first 1,000, $2 for the next 10,000, $0.60 for the next 100,000 and $0.50 for the next million, falling to $0.02 at very high volume. Its own worked examples put 100,000 requests at $76.40 and a million at $527.50. Optional subscriptions run from $99 a month for 200,000 credits to $599 for two million. New accounts get 1,000 free credits, rising to 5,000 after setup steps.
Why do some pages cost more on Crawlbase?
Site difficulty multipliers apply automatically. Standard sites are 1x, and heavily defended ones step up through tiers to 20x at the top. JavaScript rendering then doubles whatever tier applies. Failed or blocked requests cost nothing, and the dashboard has an optional hard spend cap that stops usage before the bill passes it. Test a sample of your real targets first, because the multiplier mix decides your effective rate.
Can Crawlbase return markdown for an LLM?
Yes. Setting format=md on the Crawling API returns GitHub-flavored markdown. An extra readability flag removes navigation, sidebars, footers and ad slots before conversion, which suits articles and blog posts that are going into an LLM context. Response headers report the markdown features used and the resolved base URL, so you can turn relative links back into absolute ones.
Does Crawlbase have an MCP server?
Yes. The crawlbase-mcp package runs through npx and takes your normal and JavaScript tokens as environment variables. It exposes three tools. crawl returns rendered HTML, crawl_markdown returns cleaned markdown, and crawl_screenshot returns a full-page PNG the model can look at. It uses the same infrastructure as the Crawling API, so blocked requests are handled the same way.
Is Crawlbase the same company as ProxyCrawl?
Yes. ProxyCrawl renamed itself Crawlbase, and the markdown converter still reports itself as ProxyCrawl-API in a response header. Despite the old name, the core product is the Crawling API rather than raw proxies, which is why it's listed here. Crawlbase does also sell a residential Smart AI Proxy and managed scrapers for sites such as Amazon and Google.
