TinyFish: The Best Free Firecrawl Alternative for AI Agents in 2026

I have been using Firecrawl for a while. It is a solid scraping tool, and I have recommended it in the past. But every few weeks, I would hit the same wall: credits running out faster than expected, protected sites returning failures, and the realization that “1 credit per page” does not actually mean 1 credit per page once you turn on the features that make scraping useful.

Then I found TinyFish. The first thing that caught my attention was not the agent capabilities or the benchmark scores. It was the pricing page. Search is free. Fetch is free. Not “free for 1,000 requests then we start charging.” Free. As in zero credits, zero cost, on every plan including the pay-as-you-go tier that costs nothing to start.

This article is about why I think TinyFish is the best free Firecrawl alternative right now, where Firecrawl still makes sense, and where the two tools are solving genuinely different problems.

What is TinyFish?

TinyFish is a web infrastructure platform built for AI agents. It gives you four products from a single API key:

1. Search — Live web search returning structured JSON results. Browser-rendered, never cached.
2. Fetch — Renders any URL in a real browser, returns clean markdown, JSON, or HTML.
3. Browser — Stealth browser sessions that bypass anti-bot protection, maintain login state, and handle dynamic content.
4. Web Agent — AI agents that navigate pages, fill forms, authenticate into sites, and return structured results.

The pitch is simple: one API key, one credit pool, zero routing code. The platform decides which tool to use and when. You describe what you want in natural language, and TinyFish handles the browser, the proxy, the LLM inference, and the anti-bot infrastructure.

Why I started looking beyond Firecrawl

Firecrawl is good at what it does. The /scrape and /crawl endpoints are well-designed, the markdown output is clean, and the open-source repo has over 123,000 GitHub stars. If you need to ingest a documentation site into a RAG pipeline, Firecrawl handles that fast.

But three things kept pushing me to look for alternatives:

Credit stacking

Firecrawl advertises 1 credit per page. In practice, JSON mode adds 4 credits, Enhanced mode adds another 4. A 100,000-credit Standard plan ($83/month) could deliver as few as 11,000 usable pages if you need both features active. Credits do not roll over. Retries on failed pages consume the same credits as first attempts.

Protected sites

Independent testing by Proxyway put Firecrawl’s success rate at roughly 34% on protected sites at 2 requests per second. Social media platforms are explicitly restricted. If your targets use modern bot detection, you are paying for failures.

No authentication

Firecrawl handles public pages. If your workflow requires logging in, navigating a dashboard, or making decisions based on page content, you need to build that orchestration yourself. The /interact endpoint helps with basic actions, but for multi-step authenticated flows across many sites, you are stitching together API calls and managing session state on your end.

Where TinyFish does things Firecrawl cannot

Free search and fetch

This is the one that got my attention. TinyFish Search is free on every plan. Fetch is free on every plan. The free tier gives you 30 search queries per minute and 150 URLs per minute for fetch. No credits consumed, no hidden metering.

For comparison, Firecrawl’s free tier gives you 1,000 credits per month. Search costs 2 credits per 10 results. Scrape costs 1 credit per page. Once those 1,000 credits are gone, you wait until next month or pay.

With TinyFish, I can run search and fetch operations all day, every day, at no cost. The credits only kick in when I need the Browser or Agent APIs.

Authentication and multi-step workflows

This is where the two tools diverge completely. Firecrawl extracts pages. TinyFish completes workflows.

Example: you need to log into a supplier portal, navigate to a pricing section that loads via AJAX after a 2-second delay, check which SKUs changed since last week, and return the difference as structured JSON. Across 50 portals.

Firecrawl cannot do this. It is not built for it. You would need to layer your own browser automation on top of Firecrawl’s API, manage credentials and session state yourself, and handle the orchestration between steps.

TinyFish handles the full sequence in one API call. You describe the goal, the agent handles login, navigation, waiting for dynamic content, and data extraction. One endpoint in, structured JSON out.

Anti-bot handling

Firecrawl uses Fire-Engine, a proprietary anti-bot layer that only works in the hosted version (not in the open-source self-hosted version). Independent tests show mixed results on heavily protected sites.

TinyFish runs every request through a native Chromium-based browser session with infrastructure-level request handling and residential proxy rotation. You set browser_profile: "stealth" and the platform handles the rest. Geographic routing is supported (US, GB, CA, DE, FR, JP, AU) with a single parameter.

Neither tool is perfect against the most aggressive protection systems. But TinyFish’s approach is included in every plan at no extra cost, while Firecrawl’s anti-bot layer is one of the features that costs additional credits.

Benchmark results

TinyFish scored 91.1% on the WebVoyager benchmark, ranking first against BrowserUse (88.3%), Smooth (86.6%), and Notte (84.2%). The evaluation was run independently by Mersault, with all agents using the same underlying model (Claude Sonnet) and graded by GPT-4o to eliminate self-preference bias.

On Mind2Web, TinyFish scored 89.9% accuracy. These are live-website benchmarks, not cached snapshots.

Firecrawl’s /agent endpoint does not have a comparable public benchmark yet, and per Firecrawl’s billing docs, agent requests are billed even on failure.

Pricing comparison

Here is where the numbers tell a clear story.

Firecrawl pricing

Plan	Price	Credits
Free	$0	1,000 pages/month
Hobby	$16/mo	5,000 pages
Standard	$83/mo	100,000 pages
Growth	$333/mo	500,000 pages
Scale	$599/mo	1,000,000 pages

Credit consumption: Scrape = 1/page, Crawl = 1/page, Map = 1/page, Search = 2 per 10 results, Interact = 2 per browser minute. JSON mode adds 4 credits, Enhanced mode adds 4 more. Credits do not roll over.

TinyFish pricing

Plan	Price	Credits	Search	Fetch
Pay as you go	$0.015/credit	500 free to start	30 req/min	150 URL/min
Starter	$15/mo	1,650 credits/mo	60 req/min	300 URL/min
Pro	$150/mo	16,500 credits/mo	120 req/min	600 URL/min
Enterprise	Custom	Custom	Custom	Custom

Credit consumption: Agent = 1 credit/step, Browser = 1 credit per 4 minutes (60 minute cap). Search = 0 credits. Fetch = 0 credits. Failed runs = $0. LLM inference, stealth browser, anti-bot, and proxy are all included.

Get 500 free TinyFish credits

Real-world cost example

Let’s say you need to extract product prices from 100 pages.

Scenario 1: Pages are public and static. Firecrawl wins on raw cost. 100 credits on any plan, likely under a dollar. TinyFish would use 3 to 5 agent steps per page (300 to 500 steps), costing $4.50 to $7.50 on pay-as-you-go.

Scenario 2: Pages require login and navigation. Firecrawl requires you to build authentication and navigation logic yourself. Your engineering time is the real cost here, not API credits. TinyFish handles it in one API call at $0.015 per step. A 20-step workflow across 100 sites costs about $30 total, infrastructure included.

Scenario 3: You just need search and fetch. TinyFish costs $0.00. Firecrawl costs 2 credits per 10 search results plus 1 credit per page fetched. For a research pipeline doing 5,000 searches and 10,000 page fetches per month, TinyFish saves you roughly 6,000 Firecrawl credits every month.

When to use Firecrawl instead

I want to be fair here. Firecrawl is not a bad tool. It is the wrong tool for certain jobs, and the right tool for others.

Use Firecrawl when:

• You need to crawl an entire documentation site or blog into a RAG pipeline. The /crawl and /map endpoints are purpose-built for this and cheaper than any agent-based approach.
• Your targets are public, static, and not behind aggressive bot detection. Firecrawl is fast and reliable for this use case.
• You need Pydantic schema extraction from static pages. The /extract endpoint with typed schemas is clean and predictable.
• You want open-source and self-hostable. The core is AGPL-3.0, and if your organization requires code inspection or self-deployment, Firecrawl gives you that option. TinyFish is a managed service.
• Community and ecosystem matter to you. 123,000 GitHub stars, native LangChain and LlamaIndex integrations, and a large developer community writing extensions.

Use TinyFish when:

• Your workflow involves login, authentication, or multi-step navigation.
• You need to bypass anti-bot protection without managing your own proxy infrastructure.
• You want free web search and page fetch without credit consumption.
• You are running agent workflows across many sites in parallel.
• You need geographic routing for location-specific content.
• You want one API instead of stitching together search, fetch, browser, and agent tools from different vendors.

How to get started with TinyFish

Getting set up with TinyFish takes about a minute.

1. Sign up at agent.tinyfish.ai/sign-up and grab your API key. No credit card required. You get 500 free credits.

2. Pick your integration surface. TinyFish works with:

   • REST API (api.search.tinyfish.ai and api.fetch.tinyfish.ai)
   • MCP server (Claude, Cursor, Codex, ChatGPT desktop, any MCP-aware client)
   • CLI (npm install -g @tiny-fish/cli)
   • Python SDK (pip install tinyfish)
   • TypeScript SDK (npm install @tiny-fish/sdk)
   • Agent harnesses: Claude Code, Codex, Cursor, OpenClaw, Hermes Agent, OpenCode, Cline, Goose

3. Start with free operations. Search and fetch cost nothing. Test your workflows before spending credits on the Browser or Agent APIs.

Here is a quick search call:

curl "https://api.search.tinyfish.ai?query=best+web+scraping+tools+2026" \
  -H "X-API-Key: $TINYFISH_API_KEY"

And a fetch call:

curl -X POST https://api.fetch.tinyfish.ai \
  -H "X-API-Key: $TINYFISH_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"urls": ["https://example.com"]}'

MCP configuration for Claude or Cursor:

{
  "mcpServers": {
    "tinyfish": {
      "url": "https://agent.tinyfish.ai/mcp"
    }
  }
}

Start free with 500 credits

TinyFish referral program

TinyFish has a referral program that is live now. When you sign up through a referral link, you and the person who referred you both get bonus credits. You need to make your first Search, Fetch, Browser, or Agent run to trigger the reward.

If you found this article useful and want to support it, signing up through this link gives you the same 500 free credits and throws some my way. No extra cost to you either way.

FAQ

Is TinyFish really free?

The Search and Fetch APIs are free on every plan, including the pay-as-you-go tier that costs nothing to start. You get 30 search queries per minute and 150 fetch URLs per minute on the free tier. The Agent and Browser APIs consume credits, and you get 500 free credits when you sign up. No credit card required.

Can TinyFish replace Firecrawl completely?

For scraping public, static pages in bulk, Firecrawl is faster and cheaper. TinyFish does not have a dedicated crawl endpoint. If your work is primarily full-site ingestion into RAG pipelines, Firecrawl is the better tool for that specific job. For anything involving authentication, multi-step navigation, anti-bot bypass, or agent workflows, TinyFish does what Firecrawl cannot. Many teams use both.

How does TinyFish pricing compare to Firecrawl at scale?

Firecrawl charges per page with credit multipliers for features (JSON mode +4, Enhanced mode +4). A Standard plan at $83/month with 100,000 credits can deliver as few as 11,000 pages if you need both features. TinyFish charges $0.015 per agent step with no multipliers. Search and fetch are free. At 10,000 tasks per month, TinyFish costs around $150. The full cost comparison depends on your workflow complexity and target site protection level.

Does TinyFish have an open-source version?

TinyFish is a managed service. The Cookbook is open source, and AgentQL components are partially open source. If self-hosting is a requirement, Firecrawl’s AGPL-3.0 core gives you that option, though the proprietary Fire-Engine anti-bot layer is not open source.

What is the TinyFish referral program?

TinyFish has a live referral program. Sign up through a referral link, make your first Search, Fetch, Browser, or Agent run, and both you and the referrer get bonus credits. The program is accessible from your TinyFish dashboard after signing up.

Bottom line

If you are paying for Firecrawl and your workflows are mostly hitting public pages, Firecrawl remains a good choice. It is fast, mature, and the crawl endpoint is hard to beat for bulk ingestion.

But if you are spending Firecrawl credits on search queries, page fetches, failed protected-site attempts, and building your own authentication orchestration on top, TinyFish is worth a serious look. The free search and fetch alone could cut your API bill meaningfully. The agent capabilities fill the gap that Firecrawl leaves open.

Start with the free tier. Run some searches, fetch a few pages, deploy an agent on a site that Firecrawl struggles with. The 500 free credits will tell you pretty quickly whether TinyFish fits your workflow.

Try TinyFish free