A Firecrawl alternative that doesn't need a subscription
Shotlane renders screenshots, PDFs and Markdown from any URL in real Chromium. You buy credits once and use them whenever — no monthly bill, no expiring quota. Here's an honest comparison with Firecrawl.
| Firecrawl | Shotlane | |
|---|---|---|
| Billing model | Monthly subscription (+ optional top-ups) | One-time credit packs, no subscription |
| Free tier | 1,000 credits / month | 100 credits + free web tool (10/day) |
| ~5,000 pages | $19 / month (Hobby, billed monthly) | $29 once for 10,000 |
| 100,000+ pages / month | $83 / month billed yearly (Standard) | ~$198 in packs — Firecrawl is cheaper here |
| Unused credits | Don't roll over (except Scale: one month) | Never expire |
| Screenshots & PDFs | Screenshot format available | Full screenshot + PDF API, same credits |
| Crawling whole sites | Yes (crawl, map, search) | No — one page per request |
| MCP server | Yes | Yes |
Firecrawl pricing taken from their public pricing page in October 2026; prices exclude VAT and may have changed since. Firecrawl is a trademark of its owner; we're not affiliated.
When Firecrawl is the better choice
Firecrawl is built for large-scale crawling: whole-site crawls, search, structured extraction, and very low per-page prices at high monthly volume. If you process 100k+ pages every month, it's the better deal.
When Shotlane is the better choice
If you need clean Markdown from individual pages now and then — an agent reading docs, a RAG pipeline you re-index occasionally, a weekend project — a monthly plan is overkill. Shotlane charges once, renders JavaScript, and also gives you screenshots and PDFs from the same credits.
Switching takes minutes
Shotlane is a plain HTTP API: GET /v1/screenshot?url=…, /v1/pdf or /v1/markdown with your key in a header. Common options — full_page, width, format, selector, dark_mode, delay, block_ads, hide_cookie_banners — work the way you'd expect. See the API reference.
curl "https://shotlane.dev/v1/screenshot?url=example.com&full_page=true&format=webp" \ -H "X-API-Key: $SHOTLANE_KEY" -o example.webp
Try it free
100 renders on the house, no card. If it works for you, a $9 pack lasts as long as you need it to.
100 free renders · no credit card · key shown instantly