Firecrawl Review: Great for the Web, Not for LinkedIn or Reddit

A research agent that briefs your reps before a call can only tell them what it can read. This is a review of Firecrawl, the web data API our agents call every day, for the leader deciding whether to make it that agent’s data layer. It is what we reach for first on the open web. It refuses LinkedIn and Reddit and charges 30 credits a post on X, which is where a prospect’s people say what they want.

Empact Partners is a consultancy that works inside B2B software companies’ own marketing teams, and part of what we run for partners is RevOps work: the plumbing that decides which signups and accounts deserve a sales call. Much of it is now agents our consultants direct: they read a company’s site, find the people worth writing to, and put the result in front of a consultant before anyone sends anything.

We bought Firecrawl’s Growth plan to be the reading layer for those agents, and for the research behind this site. This review grades it on one thing: whether the agent comes back with what the person writing to the account needs.

Firecrawl

Best for: research agents that read company websites, careers pages, docs, and search results.

Firecrawl is an API that turns a URL into text an agent can read, with search, site maps, and a catalog of third-party data providers called Alexandria behind the same key. You pay in credits from a monthly allowance, and a plain page costs one.

Finding the pages costs almost nothing

An account brief starts with finding the right pages: the careers page, the pricing page, the post where the company announced the thing your rep wants to mention. Search costs 2 credits per 10 results, and a map, which lists a site’s URLs, cost us 1 credit a call.

The web research behind a slate of 61 article briefs took 304 searches and 310 page reads, 1,302 credits in all. At Growth’s monthly price a credit is about eight hundredths of a cent, so the whole run came to about a dollar. The search price is per result and not per query, so only a bulk sweep makes it hurt.

Reading a page is the part worth paying for

The scrape endpoint is the reason to buy Firecrawl. Give it a URL and it returns the page as markdown an agent can read, which is the job our agents give it most: 32,570 scrapes on 8,084 different sites between September 22 and October 30.

On October 30 we ran it on the careers pages at Linear, Stripe, Notion, and HubSpot, at one credit each and 1.9 to 3.1 seconds each. Linear’s came back with 24 role links. HubSpot’s held no roles, because they live on a page behind it, so an agent has to follow the link. Notion’s ran to 26,449 characters, about half of them image and link addresses an agent pays to read.

Failure is priced fairly. A scrape that returns nothing costs nothing, and a page that answers 403 or 404 costs a credit, because Firecrawl hands you the error page it was served. About 5% of our calls failed outright in a September sample, at no charge. For anything published on a page somebody owns, this endpoint is the default we would choose again.

Most of the credits we logged were not scraping

Of the 355,567 credits in that log, 81% went to Alexandria, not to scraping. Alexandria sells typed records through the same key: people and company lookups, work emails, podcast transcripts. A people search averaged 8.3 credits a call over 13,039 calls, a podcast transcript 15, a page 1.

Eight credits for a people search is a fair trade when the result is what you need, and our outbound agents needed it. It also means a buyer who prices Firecrawl as a scraper is pricing the cheap part. Before an agent loops over a list, read the price of the catalog capability it will call, because that is where the allowance goes.

LinkedIn and Reddit are closed to it, and X costs 30 credits a post

A company’s site holds some reasons to call, such as job posts that never reach a job board. Others sit in what its people say: the founder’s thread about a migration, a VP’s LinkedIn post about the problem your product solves, the Reddit question an engineer asked last week. We pointed Firecrawl at those sources on October 30, on our own key, with the cache off:

LinkedIn company pages are not refused outright. Firecrawl routes them to third-party enrichment providers that an admin has to switch on, so the answer depends on your team’s settings and on whichever provider sits behind the switch. Posts and Reddit are refused by policy, and our September notes record Facebook and Instagram refused the same way.

Its catalog does not close the gap. On October 30, neither a search of it nor a lookup by those sites’ addresses turned up a provider for LinkedIn posts or Reddit. It offers X at 30 credits a call as a sourced summary, plus YouTube comments. A post on X costs thirty times a page and returned one reply out of 130 in our test.

An agent has no way of flagging a source it never reached, so the brief looks complete and the call nobody made never shows up in a report. For LinkedIn posts, Reddit threads, and replies on X, Firecrawl is the wrong tool, and no setting we found changes that.

The cache can tell you a live page is dead

Firecrawl may answer from its own cache, which holds a page for about two days. In September a rebuild of one of our measurement panels read 74 of 135 live blog posts as dead: the scrapes came back as 404s cached a day earlier, for addresses that answered 200 when fetched fresh. Two or three full re-collections ran before anyone read the metadata.

The fix is one setting, a maximum age of zero, and a fresh fetch costs the same credit as a cached one. Our own client sends it by default now. Any agent that decides something from a page, whether it is live, whether it changed, whether to send the email, should do the same.

Pricing

Read on firecrawl.dev on October 30, 2026. Every plan prices the same calls the same way: a page is 1 credit, search is 2 per 10 results, and the JSON, Question, and Highlight formats add 4 a page. On Growth, unused credits do not roll over, and our use swings. Firecrawl’s own count by calendar month shows 61,604 credits in August, 246,453 in September, and 437,955 in October by the 30th.

A month like August lets most of the plan lapse, and a month like October runs close to the ceiling. Top-ups on Growth cost $5 for 2,500 credits, two and a half times the plan rate, so the sizing question is whether you would rather waste part of the allowance or pay the higher rate on the overflow.

Pros and cons

What Reddit says

Users who are not selling a scraper say much what our log says: the output is usable, and the bill grows with how much of the web you point it at.

“I use it for my users to compare their homepage with their product plan. It cleanly scrapes it and gives the content back in structure.” — u/pieter-odink, r/lovable, Mar 2026

“2 - it’s super expensive - i’d need to spend $400 per month on the API to go at the scale i’d like, thats just a bit too dear for me :)” — u/BoGeee, r/n8n, Dec 2025

“Firecrawl is expensive because it crawls entire sites. Build a simple Scrapy scraper that only checks `/careers` and `/jobs`URLs directly - way faster and cheaper.” — r/n8n, Dec 2025

Both knocks are about volume, and we have paid that bill too. In July one outbound wave on this account spent 68,708 credits to reach 1,488 companies, the largest share on homepage scrapes of 24,675 candidates it should have filtered first. A later wave reached 1,615 companies for 260 credits once the free filters ran first.

Delegate

Best for: research agents that need what people say on LinkedIn, X, and Reddit, bought one result at a time.

Delegate is a marketplace of data and service APIs that an agent buys from one call at a time. Its homepage lists 1,056 services. Each call is quoted before it is ordered, the order draws on a prepaid balance, and there is no subscription. Underneath, the services are other companies’ scrapers and APIs: Apify actors for LinkedIn, TikHub for X.

It reaches the conversations Firecrawl refuses

We ran it on the half of the same slate that Firecrawl could not reach. On October 24 the LinkedIn and X side of those 61 article briefs took 156 orders and $3.34. A LinkedIn post search returned 50 posts with engagement counts and duplicates removed, in about five seconds, for $0.122. A pull of 10 comments ran $0.022, and a pull of replies on X ran $0.0011.

The post we sent through Firecrawl had come back from Delegate six days earlier with 14 replies out of the 130, plus 15 more posts from its author’s thread, for about a ninth of a cent. Firecrawl charged 30 credits, about 2.4 cents at Growth’s list price, for one reply and one more post from the author. On the sources Firecrawl refuses, and on replies on X, Delegate does the job better.

Its faults sit in the wallet and the scrapers underneath

The balance is prepaid and shared, and on October 24 it ran out at 30 of 50 planned comment pulls, so that job stopped short. Each provider we used returned its own shape: LinkedIn arrived as tidy records, X arrived as TikHub’s raw response in a file, and delivered files expire two weeks later.

The data is only as good as the scraper underneath it. On 20 LinkedIn comments, reaction and reply counts came back empty on all 20, one comment was cut off mid-word, and 16 were a single keyword such as “CMO” or “Marketing”, the mark of a post asking readers to comment a word to get something.

Prices swing by provider. Reddit search through Delegate ran $0.22 a call, 108 calls for $23.76 on October 15, the largest line in our log, for data we also pull free through Reddit’s own API. On the slate we measured, the LinkedIn and X side cost about three times the web side: $3.34 against about $1.04. Delegate reaches what Firecrawl cannot. It does not make research cheaper.

Pricing

The prices above are the ones we were quoted on those days for those services. Each listing carries its own price, and they move.

Pros and cons

We searched Reddit and found no thread discussing Delegate, so there is no independent voice to quote for it, and the record above is ours alone.

Firecrawl Reads the Pages, Delegate Reaches the Conversations

Side by side, the two products split the research along one line: whether the evidence sits on a page somebody owns or in a conversation on a platform.

The cells marked not tested are the honest edge of this review.

A brief built from a company’s own pages tells your rep what the company wants said about itself. What its people said elsewhere is the half those pages cannot show.

We never sent company sites through Delegate, because Firecrawl reads them for a credit, and no Firecrawl setting we found would have fetched the LinkedIn posts or the Reddit threads.

Firecrawl Belongs Under an Account-Research Agent, but Not Alone

Building an agent like this is RevOps work we run for partners. It starts with an audit of the research a team repeats before calls, then one agent scoped to one job, such as briefing a rep on every demo request. A named consultant answers for its output, and we settle the number it has to move before anyone builds it, such as hours handed back to reps or calls booked from the briefs.

Buy Firecrawl if the evidence your agent needs is published on pages somebody owns: company sites, careers pages, docs, pricing pages, search results. It reads them for about a credit a page, charges nothing when nothing comes back, and adds people and company records when a page is not enough.

Price the catalog calls before you loop over a list, set the cache to zero for anything that triggers an action, and size the plan knowing unused credits disappear.

Vlad Shvets

Founder @ Empact Partners

Our research runs route each call by source: a company’s own pages go to Firecrawl, posts and replies on LinkedIn and X go to Delegate, and Reddit comes straight from Reddit’s own API. Any one of them alone gets part of the brief, and the missing part decides which calls your reps never make.

Do not make Firecrawl the only source if the reason to call lives in a conversation: a LinkedIn post, a Reddit thread, the replies under a founder’s post on X. There it answers 403 or charges 30 credits for one reply, and Delegate fetches the conversation itself for between a ninth of a cent and 22 cents a call, with a wallet to watch and a data shape per provider to handle.

The line between those two buyers is where your reps’ reasons to call are written down. Get it the wrong way round and you either brief reps from brochures, or pay a broker by the call for pages Firecrawl reads for a credit.

If your reps are still calling accounts nobody researched, or researching each one by hand, book a call with me, and let’s find out whether we’re the right people to build it.