The Firecrawl alternative
without the credit math

Yes — Microlink charges one flat price per request, whatever the request does. Firecrawl bills in credits that multiply: a basic scrape is 1 credit, the enhanced (stealth) proxy is 5, search costs 2 per 10 results, and browser interaction costs 2 per minute.

On Microlink, routing through the residential proxy, extracting metadata, or returning markdown never changes what a request costs. Cache hits are free on top.

Five credits per request instead of one, per Firecrawl's own proxy docs — and auto mode escalates to it whenever the basic attempt fails. If 30% of 46,000 monthly pages sit behind bot walls, that is 32,200 + (13,800 × 5) = 101,200 credits — past the 100,000-credit Standard plan and into the $333 Growth tier.

Microlink Pro includes residential proxy routing and antibot detection at the flat request price, so the protected-page ratio never changes your bill.

Yes. One GET request returns any URL as clean markdown — see the URL to markdown guide. Because adblock ships enabled by default, ads, trackers, and cookie banners are stripped before conversion, so the markdown arrives free of consent noise.

The token math matters for LLM workloads: a typical page that costs 20,000 HTML tokens becomes about 4,000 markdown tokens — roughly 80% fewer tokens per page.

Yes. Point the same request at a web page, a PDF, or a docx, xlsx, or pptx file — Microlink converts the document to an HTML DOM at fetch time, so the identical markdown request works across all of them. A YouTube URL even returns the video's caption transcript as the markdown body.

Firecrawl parses web-hosted and local PDFs too; the difference is that on Microlink the document case needs no separate endpoint or parameter — it is the same GET request.

Crawling and monitoring are genuinely Firecrawl's territory: Microlink converts one URL per call and does not watch pages for changes — you own the queue and the diffing.

Search is covered: Microlink Search is a Google SERP API for AI agents returning normalized JSON across 10 surfaces, where every result exposes a lazy .markdown() helper to expand top matches into LLM-ready content. It is a paid workflow from the first request, since public-result collection runs on managed proxy capacity.

Both companies develop in the open, with different licenses. Firecrawl's core is AGPL-3.0 — a copyleft license that requires publishing your modifications if you serve the software to users.

Microlink's core libraries — Browserless, Metascraper, and MQL — are MIT licensed: read, fork, embed, or self-host them with no copyleft obligations.

Swap the authenticated POST for a plain GET. Firecrawl's formats: ["markdown"] becomes data.markdown.attr=markdown (add embed=markdown to receive raw markdown instead of JSON), and the metadata Firecrawl returns alongside the content is included in Microlink's standard response by default.

Screenshots, headers, and browser automation map to query parameters too — start from the markdown guide and adapt one request at a time.

Firecrawl's free plan is 1,000 one-time credits with 2 concurrent requests — once spent, it is gone. Microlink gives you 25 free requests per day, every day, with no credit card and no expiry — over 9,000 requests per year for evaluating in real conditions.

Microlink's free tier also needs no API key at all: paste the URL in a browser address bar and the response comes back.