Same quality web scraping. No monthly subscriptions. Pay only for the pages you actually scrape — starting at $0.001 per page.
No credit card. No subscription.
| Shell City | Firecrawl | ScrapingBee | Bright Data | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Cost per page | $0.001Cheapest | $0.002–$0.004 | $0.001–$0.015 | $0.004+ |
| Pricing model | Pay per use | Subscription tiers ($16–$500/mo) | Credit packs ($49–$999) | Subscription ($499/mo min) |
| Monthly minimum | $0 | $16/mo (500 credits) | $49 (one-time pack) | $499/mo |
| Free tier | 1,000 free pages | 500 credits (trial) | 1,000 credits (trial) | 7-day trial |
| Unused credits | Never expire | Expire monthly | Expire after 1 year | Expire monthly |
| Overage handling | HTTP 402 — agent tops up automatically | Hard stop or auto-upgrade | Hard stop | Overage charges |
| 10K pages/mo cost | $10 | $56 (Growth plan) | $49–$99 | $499+ |
| 100K pages/mo cost | $100 | $500 (Business plan) | $299–$999 | $499+ |
1,000 free pages. No credit card. No subscription.
| Feature | Shell City | Firecrawl | ScrapingBee |
|---|---|---|---|
| JavaScript rendering | ✓ Included | ✓ Included | 5x credit cost |
| Structured data extraction | ✓ 5 credits | ✓ Included | ✕ |
| Clean markdown output | ✓ Default | ✓ Default | ✕ HTML only |
| Anti-bot bypass | ✓ Included | ✓ Included | Extra credits |
| Proxy rotation | ✓ Included | ✓ Included | ✓ Included |
| HTTP 402 auto-billing | ✓ Agent-native | ✕ | ✕ |
| Batch/crawl mode | Coming soon | ✓ Included | ✕ |
| Sitemap discovery | Coming soon | ✓ Included | ✕ |
| OpenAPI spec | ✓ | ✓ | ✕ |
| AI agent optimized | ✓ Built for agents | Developer-focused | Developer-focused |
Enter your expected monthly page volume to compare costs across providers.
Transparency time: Shell City routes scraping requests through providers like Firecrawl under the hood. We negotiate volume pricing, pool capacity across all customers, and pass the savings directly to you.
You get the same rendering quality and reliability that Firecrawl is known for — without paying their retail markup. Our margin comes from volume efficiency, not inflated per-page pricing.
Think of it like buying wholesale instead of retail. Same product, better price.
Get 1,000 free pages. No credit card. No subscription. Your agent starts scraping in 30 seconds.
Get your free API key →