A Firecrawl alternative that only charges when it works, and never makes data up.
If you are weighing up alternatives to Firecrawl, it is usually the bill or the trust. You pay for pages that came back blocked, or a failed fetch quietly hands back data you cannot rely on. Haunt fixes both. Send a URL and a plain-English prompt, get clean JSON, and pay only when it actually returns data. When it cannot get in, it tells you plainly instead of guessing.
The short version
Haunt does one job well. It reads a page, or a list of pages you hand it, and returns clean JSON. Honestly, with no charge for blocked pages and no invented data.
If that is the job you have, it is the sharper tool for it.
You pay only when it actually works.
A bot wall, a login screen, or a captcha still counts as a fetched page on most tools, so you get billed for a result that gave you nothing usable. Over a month of hard pages that adds up quietly. Haunt does not charge for a call that cannot return data. Full stop.
In their own pricing
Firecrawl's pricing states it charges "when a page is fetched successfully, even if the site itself responds with an error."
So a blocked or errored page can still cost you a credit. On Haunt, that call is free and you get a clear reason instead of a bill.
The differences that actually change your day.
These are the three things people tell us they came looking for. Honest comparison, only the axes that matter when you are choosing between us.
| Haunt | Firecrawl | |
|---|---|---|
| Blocked, captcha or login pages | Free. You pay only when data comes back. | Billed if the page was fetched, even on a site error (their published pricing). |
| A page it can't read cleanly | A clear reason: blocked, login, or captcha. Grounding checks mean you never get fabricated JSON. | You still receive, and pay for, the fetched result. |
| Getting started | One API call, or one MCP tool. Nothing to configure, nothing stored after. | A broader platform with more to set up and learn. |
Firecrawl details from firecrawl.dev, checked 5 July 2026. The billing line is quoted directly from their pricing. If anything is out of date, tell us and we will correct it. Honest comparisons only.
An honest no beats a confident fake yes.
The failure that hurts most is the silent one. A page is blocked, and instead of saying so, a tool returns an empty or invented result that poisons everything your agent does downstream, and you do not even know it happened. Haunt refuses to return data it cannot find on the page. That is the whole point of it.
Built for agents, not dashboards
Haunt ships as an MCP server as well as a REST API, so an agent in Claude or another runtime calls it as a native tool. No wrapper to write, no page content kept after the call.
Point it at a page that's been giving you trouble.
One API call, or one MCP tool. 1,000 free credits, no card. If it can't read the page it tells you and charges you nothing. That is the whole pitch.