The 7 best APIs for web crawling in AI lead gen

A web crawling API fetches pages from the open web and returns them as clean text, Markdown or JSON. In AI lead gen, the people who need one are teams that feed an agent fresh company pages, pricing pages and job posts to qualify accounts.

Most readers do not need a crawler for the whole job. They need contacts, and a crawler only finds them slowly: one page at a time, with blocks, retries and a parser to maintain. We rank seven tools and show what each costs at 1M pages or records a month. LeadOcean sits first because it skips the crawl for people and company data, and says plainly where it cannot help. For a Crustdata comparison, see /alternatives/crustdata.

TL;DR

What we evaluated

• Price at 1M. We read the public price list and did the multiplication. Where a vendor publishes no price, we say so and do not guess.
• What one unit costs. A credit, a record and a page are not the same. We note when extraction or rendering costs extra.
• Speed. Published rate limits and concurrency, because a crawl you cannot parallelise is a slow crawl.
• Agent access. A hosted MCP server, a documented API, or both.
• Fit for lead gen. Does it return contacts, company facts and buying signals, or only page text you must parse yourself?

We did not run a crawl benchmark for this page, so there are no speed or success-rate figures here. Every number comes from a public price list or doc, checked in September 2026.

1. LeadOcean: best for contacts without a crawl

LeadOcean is not a crawler. It is a database of 693M people and 67M companies that you call over REST or a hosted MCP server. If your crawl exists to find the right person at the right company, this is the shorter route.

Search by title, level, country, industry or technology, then enrich with POST /v1/people/enrich or pull work emails from GET /v2/people/email/work. The technology filter draws on about 7.8M crawled sites, so you can target by stack without running your own crawler. Counts are free: leadocean_count_leads and leadocean_count_companies size a list before you spend a record.

It cannot fetch an arbitrary page. If you need a prospect's pricing page or a competitor's changelog, pair it with one of the crawlers below.

Pros

• Flat price: Agency is $497 a month with a fair-use pace, not credits.
• 200 requests a second on Agency, per key.
• 13 MCP tools, with OAuth sign-in and no key to paste.
• Emails and phones on every plan, including Free.
• Counts, filter lists and a miss on enrich cost nothing.

Cons

• No page fetch, no JavaScript rendering, no custom extraction.
• The dataset refreshes monthly, so a page changed yesterday will not show.
• The app exports CSVs but has no sequencer, dialer or CRM.

Best for: teams that want people and company data over an API or an agent.

Pricing: Free is $0 for 1,000 records for life. Solo is $97 a month, Agency $497 and Platform $1,997 (LeadOcean pricing, October 2026).

2. Firecrawl: best for LLM-ready pages

Firecrawl turns a URL into Markdown or structured JSON. One credit buys one page on a basic scrape, crawl or map, and the same rate applies on every plan (Firecrawl pricing, September 2026).

The bill moves with the format. JSON, Question and Highlight outputs add 4 credits a page, so extracted pages cost 5 credits each. A 403 or 404 page is returned and still costs 1 credit, while a scrape with no result is free.

Firecrawl runs a hosted MCP server, with keyless access for light use and sign-in or an API key for the full tool set (Firecrawl MCP docs, September 2026). For a lead gen agent that reads company sites, it is the cleanest default.

Pros

• Predictable credits: 1 per basic page, shared across scrape, crawl and map.
• Scale allows 10,000 scrape requests a minute and 100 concurrent browsers.
• Free plan has 1,000 credits a month with no card.
• Hosted MCP server.

Cons

• Extraction is 5 credits a page. 1M extracted pages need 5M credits, not 1M.
• Rate limits on Free and Hobby are low: 10 and 100 requests a minute on scrape.
• No contact data. You still need a source for emails and phones.

Best for: agents that read company pages and need clean text.

Pricing: Free, Hobby $19 a month ($16 billed yearly), Standard $99 ($83), Growth $399 ($333), Scale $749 ($599) for 1M credits (Firecrawl pricing, September 2026).

3. Exa: best for search plus contents

Exa is a search API first and a crawler second. You query the web, then fetch the contents of the results at $1 per 1k pages (Exa pricing, September 2026).

It also exposes a people index and a company index, plus enrichment for emails at $0.02 each and phones at $0.07 each inside its Agent product. That makes it the one crawler on this list that goes near contact data. Search itself starts at $4 per 1k requests, so a pipeline that searches and then reads pages pays for both.

The Free plan gives $10 of credits every month with MCP server access, a Claude connector and a ChatGPT plugin.

Pros

• Finds URLs for you, so you do not need a seed list.
• Contents at $1 per 1k pages is a low page rate.
• MCP server, Claude connector and ChatGPT plugin on the Free plan.
• People and company indexes for lead research.

Cons

• Search and contents are billed separately, so the all-in cost at 1M is higher than $1,000.
• Pay as you go reaches 25 searches a second. Higher limits are custom.
• Agent runs range from $0.012 to $1.00, which is hard to forecast.

Best for: agents that need to find companies and read what they say.

Pricing: Free with $10 monthly credits, then pay as you go. Search from $4 per 1k requests (Exa pricing, September 2026).

4. Bright Data: best for sites that fight back

Bright Data sells scrapers for named sites, including LinkedIn people and company pages, Crunchbase and Google Maps. The price is per successful record, with proxies, unblocking and parsing included (Bright Data pricing, September 2026).

Pay as you go is $1.5 per 1K records. The Scale plan is $499 a month with 384,000 records included, then $1.3 per 1K. At 1M records that works out to $499 plus 616,000 at $1.3 per 1K, about $1,300 a month.

Concurrency is unlimited on paid plans. Its MCP server gives 5,000 free requests a month (Bright Data MCP, September 2026).

Pros

• You pay only for delivered records, not failed ones.
• Proxies, CAPTCHA solving and JSON parsing are in the price.
• Ready-made scrapers for LinkedIn, Crunchbase and Google Maps.
• Unlimited concurrency on paid plans.

Cons

• At 1M records it costs about 1.7 times Firecrawl's basic scrape.
• Pre-built scrapers cover named sites, not any URL.

Best for: teams that must pull from protected sites at volume.

Pricing: Free 5K records a month, pay as you go $1.5 per 1K, Scale $499 a month (Bright Data pricing, September 2026).

5. Apify: best for a scraper per site

Apify is a marketplace of Actors, each a scraper for one site or job, run on Apify's platform. You pay a monthly plan plus usage, and each Actor sets its own pricing model (Apify pricing, September 2026).

Plans are Free with $5 of prepaid usage, Starter at $19, Scale at $199 and Business at $999 a month, with 10% off billed yearly. A compute unit costs $0.20 on Free and Starter, $0.16 on Scale and $0.13 on Business.

Because cost depends on which Actor you run, there is no public price at 1M. Test your Actor on a small batch and extrapolate. The MCP server at mcp.apify.com lets an agent discover and run Actors (Apify MCP docs, September 2026).

Pros

• A large store of ready Actors, so you rarely start from zero.
• MCP server to run Actors from an agent.
• Prepaid usage is listed in plain dollars, and the Free plan blocks you at the limit instead of billing.
• Free plan includes $5 of usage with no card.

Cons

• No flat cost at volume: price depends on the Actor and its runtime.
• Excess usage is added to your next invoice.
• Quality varies by Actor, since many are community-built.

Best for: one-off or niche sites that already have an Actor.

Pricing: Free, Starter $19, Scale $199, Business $999 a month plus usage (Apify pricing, September 2026).

6. ScrapingBee: best for simple HTML fetches

ScrapingBee is a plain fetch API that handles browsers and proxy rotation. Plans run from Hobby at $19 a month for 75,000 credits to Business+ at $599 for 8M credits (ScrapingBee pricing, September 2026).

Credits are not pages. A default request renders JavaScript and costs 5 credits, a premium proxy with rendering costs 25, and a stealth proxy costs 75. AI extraction adds 5 (ScrapingBee docs, September 2026).

So 1M rendered pages need 5M credits, which means Business+ at $599. With rendering off at 1 credit a page, 1M fits in the $99 Startup plan. ScrapingBee also lists an MCP server for agents (ScrapingBee, October 2026).

Pros

• Lowest 1M price here: $99 a month for 1M credits, rendering off.
• Auto mode charges only for the configuration that succeeds, and nothing if all fail.
• Up to 400 concurrent requests on Business+.
• Markdown output and AI extraction rules.

Cons

• The credit multiplier makes real cost hard to predict.
• Hard sites on stealth proxies cost 75 credits a request.
• No contact data, and no crawl that follows links for you.

Best for: developers who want one endpoint to fetch HTML.

Pricing: Hobby $19, Freelance $49, Startup $99, Business $249, Business+ $599 a month (ScrapingBee pricing, September 2026).

7. Crustdata: best for live web joined to people data

Crustdata is a people and company data API with web endpoints. Its batch search can retrieve results from the web in real time, up to 1,000 records a job, or from its index, up to 10,000 (Crustdata batch search, September 2026).

It has a hosted MCP server at install.crustdata.com with OAuth sign-in (Crustdata MCP docs, September 2026). The cost is the sticking point. The pricing page lists no plan names and no dollar price per credit, so there is no public 1M price (Crustdata pricing, September 2026).

Default rate limits are 15 requests a minute on enrich and 30 on search (Crustdata rate limits, September 2026).

Pros

• Live web retrieval and an indexed database behind one API.
• Hosted MCP server.
• Search costs 0.03 credits a result (Crustdata docs, September 2026).

Cons

• No public dollar price and no plan list.
• Low default rate limits.
• Contact enrich needs an enterprise plan, and self-serve keys get a 403.

Best for: teams that want live web results next to a people index and will negotiate a contract.

Pricing: Credits, with no public dollar price (Crustdata pricing, September 2026).

Comparison table

How to choose

• You need contacts, not pages: use LeadOcean. Count the list for free, then enrich by person_id.
• Your agent reads company sites: use Firecrawl for Markdown at 1 credit a page.
• Your agent must find the sites first: use Exa, which searches and returns contents.
• You must scrape LinkedIn or Maps at volume: use Bright Data, and budget about $1.3 to $1.5 per 1K.
• The site is niche: check Apify Store for an Actor before you build one.
• You want the cheapest raw HTML: use ScrapingBee with rendering off.
• You will sign a contract anyway: ask Crustdata for a quote.

Verdict

LeadOcean wins when the output you want is people and companies, because it skips the crawl and costs $497 a month at 1M records. Firecrawl wins for agents that read pages, at $749 a month for 1M basic scrapes. Exa wins when the agent must find the pages first. Bright Data is the pick for protected sites at volume, ScrapingBee for cheap raw HTML, Apify for niche sites with an existing Actor. Crustdata is worth a quote only if you want live web search beside a people index. If you need both, pair LeadOcean with one crawler. See our pricing and the roundup of AI lead gen tools.

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