Crawl4AI vs Spider

Q: Does Spider charge for failed requests?

Spider's pages give two answers. Its pricing page says "Failed requests cost $0"; its llms.txt, written for agents, says "A failed page is not free". Crawl4AI charges nothing for a failed call, a blocked page included.

Q: Does Spider have a free plan?

Spider has no monthly free allowance: it gives 2,500 credits once, worth $0.25, plus a rate-limited keyless /scrape. Crawl4AI gives 1,000 credits every month with no card, and 20 credits with no signup.

Q: Does Spider give refunds?

Spider's terms say a purchase "is non-refundable and non-transferable". On Crawl4AI, a first plan payment or an extra-credit purchase is refundable within 14 days if none of its credits were used.

Q: Where does Spider process data? Does it have EU data residency?

Spider's privacy policy says "Our main region is the United States", and that some pages load on devices run by people outside Spider. Crawl4AI runs in the EU, Singapore and the US, keeps account and billing data in the EU, and offers APAC residency on request.

Q: Can Spider extract JSON from a page?

Yes, with a prompt on its /ai routes, which need an AI Studio subscription, labeled Alpha, from $6 a month on top of credits. Crawl4AI's /extract works on every plan; the measured median is 1.87 credits a call.

Q: Is Crawl4AI self-hosted only, with no published price?

No. Spider's page about Crawl4AI says the Cloud API is in closed beta with no published price, and that is out of date. Crawl4AI Cloud is live in three regions with a public price list: 100,000 plain pages cost $10. It has a hosted MCP server, 93 recipes, and 87,236 GitHub stars on the open-source engine (GitHub, 2026-11-12). Spider's benchmark tested the self-hosted library without proxies, not the Cloud.

Both turn web pages into clean data for AI. Spider bills each page by its size and CPU time, so you know the price after the call. Crawl4AI charges a fixed price by the work the page needed, never charges a failed call, and comes from the team that wrote the open-source crawler.

Facts last checked 12 Nov 2026

Crawl4AI Cloudcrawl4ai.com

Price per pageFixed, known before the call

Failed callsFree, blocked pages included

Free every month1,000 credits, no card

Data regionEU, Singapore or US

SSpiderspider.cloud

Price per page"There is no per-page price"

Failed callsPages disagree: "not free" or $0

Free every monthNone; $0.25 once on signup

Data region"Main region is the United States"

Talk to us about your team See the side by side ↓

Crawl4AI vs Spider: the short answer

Crawl4AI charges a fixed price by the work each page needs ($0.10 per 1,000 plain pages) and nothing for a failed or blocked call; Spider says , and its own pages give two answers on whether a failed page costs money. Crawl4AI gives 1,000 free credits every month and refunds within 14 days; Spider gives , and a purchase . Crawl4AI runs in the EU, Singapore and the US with teams and an audit log from the $99 Builder plan; Spider's . Agents set Crawl4AI up from one message, /extract works on every plan with no add-on, and 93 recipes return named sites such as Amazon as rows for 1 credit.

Which one fits

Different tools fit different jobs. Here is when each one is the better choice.

SChoose Spider if

You need a live browser your code drives: , billed by the GB and the minute.
You want a raw proxy endpoint to use in your own code, with .
You want an official SDK in .
Most of your pages are small and plain, where billing by size can cost less: in HTTP mode.

Choose Crawl4AI if

You build with AI agents: one message sets Crawl4AI up in Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, Windsurf, Gemini CLI or OpenCode, and 17 MCP tools let the agent run recipes, price a call first and manage its budget.
You want a fixed price per page that a finance team can budget, and nothing for a failed or blocked call.
You need named sites as rows: 93 recipes, an Amazon product for 1 credit with the same columns every time. Spider's own Amazon page measures of Markdown text.
You want JSON extraction on every plan; Spider's needs from $6 a month on top of credits.
You want money that stays yours: 1,000 free credits every month, 14-day refunds and extra credits that never expire.
You need data in the EU, Singapore or the US, and a team with an audit log from Builder.
You want to run it inside your network on the same engine, Apache 2.0.

For enterprise teams

The controls your security team asks for

Crawl4AI's Enterprise plan next to Spider's. Spider's side restates its own pages; click a line to see the quote.

Control	Crawl4AI Enterprise	SSpider Enterprise
SSO (SAML, OIDC)	✓ Yes	Not published
SCIM user sync	✓ Yes	Not published
Teams, roles and audit log	✓ From Builder ($99), no seat limit
Zero data retention	✓ Yes
IP allowlist and key limits	✓ Yes	Not published
Static exit IPs	✓ Yes
Where data is processed	EU, Singapore or US, your choice
Deployment	Cloud, dedicated fleet, inside your network, managed pipeline; one engine
DPA and invoice billing	✓ Every Enterprise plan
Refunds	14 days, if no credits were used
Status page	Hourly uptime per service, public
Uptime and response SLA	Typical: 99.9% a month; service down: first answer within 1 hour, 24/7; part broken: 4 business hours; a question: 1 business day; 5% of the month's fee back if missed, 10% under 99%
Support	A named engineer
Security assurance	Controls monitored every day in Drata, with the evidence kept; dependencies watched for known vulnerabilities; SOC 2 audit by Sensiba under way, report target January 2027. Security pack on request: policies, audit status, DPA, questionnaire answers.	SOC 2 or ISO 27001: Not published

Bring your current invoice

Send us your last scraping bill, from Spider or anyone else. We price the same workload on Crawl4AI and walk you through it on a 30-minute call.

Book the invoice call Enterprise plan

Same job, two calls

5 jobs an agent does every day. The call on each side, and the price of 1,000 of them at list. The label marks the side that costs less for that job.

01 · One page to Markdowna plain page

Crawl4AI $0.10/ 1,000

curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com","format":"md"}'

0.1 credit, $0.08 per 1,000 on Builder. The price is fixed before the call.

Spider costs less$0.02–$0.10/ 1,000

curl -X POST https://api.spider.cloud/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SPIDER_API_KEY" \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com",
       "return_format":"markdown"}'

for an average page. ; you see the price after the call.

02 · Your first 10,000 pages a monthplain pages, free account

Crawl4AI costs less$0/ 1,000

curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com","format":"md"}'

The Free plan gives 1,000 credits every month with no card: 10,000 plain pages.

Spider $0.02–$0.10/ 1,000

curl -X POST https://api.spider.cloud/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SPIDER_API_KEY" \
  -d '{"url":"https://example.com",
       "return_format":"markdown"}'

No monthly allowance: . After that, pay as you go.

03 · A page that blocks botsthe page comes back blocked

Crawl4AI costs less$0/ 1,000

curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '{"url":"https://hard-site.example",
       "proxy":"extra"}'

A page we cannot get costs nothing. A hard page we do get costs 2 credits.

Spider Unclear/ 1,000

curl -X POST https://api.spider.cloud/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SPIDER_API_KEY" \
  -d '{"url":"https://hard-site.example",
       "return_format":"markdown",
       "stealth":true}'

Their agent docs say ; their pricing page says . A stealth page's price: Not published.

04 · An Amazon product as rowstitle, price, rating, reviews

Crawl4AI costs less$1.00/ 1,000

curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/recipes/amazon-product \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '{"product":"<asin>"}'

A recipe: 2 units × 0.5 credit. ASIN, title, price, rating, review count and more, the same columns every time; one of 93.

Spider ≈ $2.72/ 1,000

curl -X POST https://api.spider.cloud/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SPIDER_API_KEY" \
  -d '{"url":"https://www.amazon.com/dp/<asin>",
       "return_format":"markdown"}'

Their own Amazon page measures , returned as Markdown text, not columns.

05 · Structured JSON from a pagedescribed in plain words, filled by a model

Crawl4AI costs less$1.87/ 1,000

curl https://api.crawl4ai.com/extract \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $KEY" \
  -d '{"url":"https://news.ycombinator.com",
       "instruction":"the top stories"}'

Median of real calls this week: 0.5 credit for the page plus the model's tokens. Every plan, no add-on.

Spider ~$10 + plan/ 1,000

curl -X POST https://api.spider.cloud/ai/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SPIDER_API_KEY" \
  -d '{"url":"https://news.ycombinator.com",
       "prompt":"the top stories"}'

, plus from $6 a month at 1 request a second. .

Crawl4AI vs Spider, side by side

Each Spider cell restates Spider's own pages, read on 12 Nov 2026. Click it to see the quote and the page. "Not published" means those pages say nothing about it, not that it is missing.

	Crawl4AI Cloud	SSpider
Pricing
How you pay	Credits in every plan: Free, Starter $10, Builder $99, Scale $499
1,000 plain / browser / hard pages	$0.10 / $0.50 / $2.00
Failed calls	Free, blocked pages included
A page already cached	Half price	Not published
Extra credits	Never expire
Refunds	14 days, if no credits were used
What you get back
Formats	Markdown, HTML, links, media, metadata, tables; engine and cache on every answer
Whole site	/site deep crawl (500 pages a call); /scan up to 50,000 URLs
Search	/search 1 credit; Google results as data with /serp
Named sites	93 recipes; an Amazon product or a LinkedIn profile 1 credit
Documents	PDF, Word and Excel; a PDF costs one page
Extraction	/extract on every plan; median 1.87 credits a call
Agents
MCP	Hosted, no install; key or OAuth; 17 tools
Setup	One message sets it up in 7 coding agents
Agent budget	Estimate, balance, spend cap and top-up as tools; cost on every answer
Open source
License	Apache 2.0, 87,236 GitHub stars
Self-host	The same engine as the Cloud

Crawl4AI's prices come from its live price list, GET /v1/prices. Prices change; check each product's own pricing page before you decide.

The trade-off

What each one does better

SWhere Spider does best

Live browser sessions. A cloud browser your code drives over CDP, billed by the GB and the minute.
A raw proxy endpoint. Residential exits you can use from your own code.
SDKs in four languages. Python, JavaScript, Rust and Go, and a CLI.
Small plain pages. Billing by size can cost less when every page is light.

Where Crawl4AI is the better choice

A price you know first. 0.1 credit for a plain page, fixed before the call, nothing for a failed or blocked call, half price for a page we already hold.
Made for agents. One message sets it up; 17 MCP tools cover recipes, jobs, cost estimates and the budget.
Ready data from named sites. 93 recipes, Amazon and LinkedIn included, return fixed columns for about 1 credit; /extract on every plan.
Built for enterprise. Three regions, teams and an audit log from Builder, SSO and SCIM, and 14-day refunds.

Switch in one prompt

Move your Spider calls in minutes

Paste this into Claude Code, Cursor or Codex in your project. It finds your Spider calls and moves them to Crawl4AI, one endpoint at a time, and keeps both working until you check the results.

Move this project's Spider calls to Crawl4AI Cloud. Read https://crawl4ai.com/llms.txt first. 1. Find every call to the Spider API or SDK. 2. Map each one: POST /scrape → POST /scrape · stealth: true → proxy: extra · POST /crawl → POST /site · POST /links → POST /scan · POST /search → GET /search · /serp · /ai/scrape, /ai/crawl → POST /extract · css_extraction_map → POST /extract with a schema · /fetch/{domain}/{path} → POST /recipes/{name}. 3. Read the key from CRAWL4AI_API_KEY (YOUR_CRAWL4AI_API_KEY). 4. Keep the old path behind a flag; compare 20 real URLs on both; show me the diff.

then add your API key. Get a free key

Spider		Crawl4AI
POST /scrape	→	POST /scrape
stealth: true	→	proxy: extra
POST /crawl	→	POST /site
POST /links	→	POST /scan
POST /search	→	GET /search · /serp
/ai/scrape, /ai/crawl	→	POST /extract
css_extraction_map	→	POST /extract with a schema
/fetch/{domain}/{path}	→	POST /recipes/{name}

From both products' docs, 12 Nov 2026.

Using both

Not either-or. Both speak MCP, so one agent can hold both. A team could keep Spider for a live browser its code drives or a raw proxy endpoint, and use Crawl4AI for recipes, extraction, Google results and EU data.

Spider
cloud browser · proxy endpoint

Crawl4AI
recipes · extraction · EU data

Frequently asked questions

How much does Spider cost?

Spider bills $1 per GB of page data plus $0.0001 per CPU minute, so the price of a page depends on its size; its compare page says . Its guide puts 1,000 average pages at $0.02 to $0.16, and its Amazon page at about $2.72 per 1,000. Crawl4AI prints a fixed price: $0.10 per 1,000 plain pages and $0.50 per 1,000 browser pages, known before the call.

Does Spider charge for failed requests?

Spider's pages give two answers. Its pricing page says ; its llms.txt, written for agents, says . Crawl4AI charges nothing for a failed call, a blocked page included.

Does Spider have a free plan?

Spider has no monthly free allowance: it gives , plus a rate-limited keyless /scrape. Crawl4AI gives 1,000 credits every month with no card, and 20 credits with no signup.

Does Spider give refunds?

Spider's terms say a purchase . On Crawl4AI, a first plan payment or an extra-credit purchase is refundable within 14 days if none of its credits were used.

Where does Spider process data? Does it have EU data residency?

Spider's privacy policy says , and that some pages load on devices run by people outside Spider. Crawl4AI runs in the EU, Singapore and the US, keeps account and billing data in the EU, and offers APAC residency on request.

Can Spider extract JSON from a page?

Yes, with a prompt on its /ai routes, which need , labeled Alpha, from $6 a month on top of credits. Crawl4AI's /extract works on every plan; the measured median is 1.87 credits a call.

Is Crawl4AI self-hosted only, with no published price?

No. Spider's page about Crawl4AI says the , and that is out of date. Crawl4AI Cloud is live in three regions with a public price list: 100,000 plain pages cost $10. It has a hosted MCP server, 93 recipes, and 87,236 GitHub stars on the open-source engine (GitHub, 2026-11-12). Spider's benchmark tested the self-hosted library without proxies, not the Cloud.

Sources and method

We read these pages on 12 Nov 2026. Crawl4AI's facts come from its live price list, docs and terms. Something wrong or out of date? Write to hello@crawl4ai.com and we fix it.

This page for your agent or notes · Markdown ↗ · JSON ↗