Crawlbase pricing vs FourA: what 1,000 pages cost, site by site

Crawlbase pricing vs FourA: does a harder site cost more?

On Crawlbase it does, and on FourA it doesn't. On the same $99 a month, 1,000 pages from hermes.com cost $0.99 on Crawlbase's Crawling API without a browser and $1.98 with one, while FourA charges $0.055 to $0.11 per 1,000 HTTP requests and $0.275 to $0.55 rendered, on any site. We read Crawlbase's pricing page, its scraping cookbook and our own prices on 8 October 2026; all prices are in US dollars.

What does FourA charge per page?

FourA prices a request by the engine that ran it, never by the domain. Single costs 1 credit, or 2 with a browser profile (the unblocker parameter, on by default). Browser costs 5 credits, and 10 only when a page asked for a verification step and Browser completed it.

Startup is $99 a month for 1,800,000 credits on foura.ai/prices, as of 8 October 2026. A failed request costs nothing: only requests that delivered the data you asked for are billed, and every response carries an X-FourA-Credits header with what that call spent.

How does Crawlbase price the same pages?

Crawlbase's Starter plan is $99 a month for 200,000 credits, about $0.50 per 1,000. One credit buys one standard request and JavaScript rendering doubles it. Then a site difficulty multiplier, ×1 to ×20 on the pricing page, scales the total, and you don't pick it: "a small set of heavily defended sites carries a higher multiplier, applied automatically."

The cookbook publishes that multiplier per site. Five examples, last tested 6 September 2026: hermes.com is "Complex" at 2 credits, amazon.com is "Moderate" at 1.5, and reddit.com, booking.com and medium.com are "Standard" at 1. Here's what 1,000 pages cost on each side's $99 plan:

Why FourA comes out ahead here

On a site Crawlbase rates Standard, its plain request costs $0.495 per 1,000 against FourA's $0.11 with a browser profile, 4.5 times apart. On hermes.com that gap doubles to 9 times, because the multiplier applies there and FourA's price doesn't move. Rendering is the closest row, and it's still $0.99 against $0.275 on a Standard site, 3.6 times. Even if every FourA page needed a verification step and every Crawlbase page sat on its Standard tier, $0.55 against $0.99 leaves FourA 1.8 times ahead.

And moving up a plan doesn't change the order. Crawlbase's Growth plan is $599 for 2,000,000 credits, $0.30 per 1,000. FourA's Business plan is $249 for 9,000,000, so a Single request costs $0.028 to $0.055 per 1,000 and a Browser request $0.14 to $0.28.

Crawlbase deserves credit for how much it publishes: 356 cookbook recipes, each with the site's price tier, its measured success rate and a working call, refreshed monthly. Pay as you go needs no monthly fee, and a hard spend cap stops the bill where you set it.

Run the same request on FourA

Split last month's Crawlbase invoice by site and look up each site's tier in the cookbook. Then price the same pages on FourA at 2 credits per plain request and 10 per rendered one (that assumes every page needed a verification step). That's the most those pages can cost on Single and Browser. For bills by the gigabyte, see our per GB vs per page breakdown.

Frequently asked

Does a page from a harder site cost more on FourA? No. The credit cost follows the engine and whether Browser completed a verification step, so a new domain costs what the last one did.

Is a failed request free on both? Crawlbase's pricing page says a request that fails is never billed. FourA bills only requests that delivered the data you asked for, and your validate rules decide what counts.

Can I try both without a card? Crawlbase starts every account with 1,000 free credits, up to 5,000 after setup steps. FourA's Free plan gives 3,000 credits every month, with no card and no time limit.

So run your most expensive site first: create a free account at auth.foura.ai/signup, send ten URLs from the site with your highest Crawlbase multiplier through Single, and read X-FourA-Credits on each answer.