October 26, 2026

Browserbase pricing · what 100 browser hours cost, and when a scraper’s browser costs less

Browserbase Developer is $20 a month billed monthly for 100 browser hours. Your bill has five meters. On October 26, 2026 prices, Browserbase costs less at 100 hours. At 500 hours, the two tie at $99 a month billed monthly, and Firecrawl costs less billed yearly if each session fits in 10 minutes.

Browserbase rents you web browsers that run in the cloud, so your code or AI agent can open pages, click and log in. A browser hour is one browser running for one hour, and it is the main thing Browserbase bills for.

Notebook sketch of a cloud with five meter dials on it labelled hours, search, fetch, proxy GB and agent runs, with a small stopwatch beside it set to 10 min — One plan price, five meters.

The short answer

Pick Browserbase Developer if you need about 100 browser hours a month. It is $20 a month billed monthly. Every Firecrawl plan that covers 100 hours costs more.

Pick Browserbase if your sessions run longer than 10 minutes. Logins that stay open, captcha flows and agents that work for an hour need a long session, and Firecrawl ends each session at 10 minutes.

Pick Firecrawl if you run 500 or more browser hours a month in short jobs that open a page, click and read. Billed monthly, Firecrawl Standard and Browserbase Startup are both $99 a month for 500 hours. Firecrawl Standard is $83 a month billed yearly.

The five meters on a Browserbase bill

As of October 26, 2026, Browserbase charges for five things: browser hours, agent runs, fetch calls, proxy data and search calls. Each plan includes a set amount of each one, then charges for more.

Meter	Free	Developer, $20 a month billed monthly	Startup, $99 a month billed monthly
Browser hours	1	100, then $0.12 an hour	500, then $0.10 an hour
Agent runs	3	15	50
Fetch calls	1,000	1,000, then $1 per 1,000	10,000, then $0.50 per 1,000
Proxy data	none listed	1 GB, then $12 a GB	5 GB, then $10 a GB

A proxy is a middle server that sends your traffic from another address. Proxy data is the gigabytes that pass through it.

Search calls are the fifth meter. Free, Developer and Startup each include 1,000 search calls. Past that, Developer and Startup charge $5 per 1,000. For fetch calls, Developer includes 1,000 and Startup includes 10,000.

Concurrency is the number of browsers you can run at the same time. Free allows 3, Developer 25 and Startup 100.

Prices are as of October 26, 2026, and every Browserbase plan is billed monthly. Scale has a custom price and starts at 250 browsers at once.

Sketch of a long paper receipt with five lines, browser hours, agent runs, fetch calls, proxy GB and search calls, each with an included amount and a price after it, a yellow marker stripe across the browser hours line — The plan price covers the first slice of each meter.

How long a Browserbase session can run

A session is one browser kept open from start to finish.

Browserbase’s docs say: “The maximum duration of a session is 6 hours.” As of October 26, 2026, Free caps each session at 15 minutes, and Browserbase lists no cap on the paid plans.

Data retention, how long Browserbase keeps your session data, is 7 days on Free and 30 days on Developer and Startup.

How Firecrawl bills a browser by the minute

Firecrawl is a scraping API with a browser feature called Interact. Firecrawl bills everything in credits, its unit of use.

Firecrawl’s Interact page says a browser costs “2 credits per session minute, prorated by the second.” Prorated means you pay only for the seconds you use. Prompt-based actions, where you tell the browser what to do in plain words, cost 7 credits a minute. Each scrape adds 1 credit.

The same page sets the limit: “Sessions expire automatically after 10 minutes of total time or 5 minutes of inactivity, whichever comes first.”

So one browser hour on Firecrawl is 60 × 2 = 120 credits. With prompt-based actions, it is 60 × 7 = 420 credits.

Sketch of 60 small coins in a row labelled 1 minute each, doubled into a stack of 120, with a sticky note that says 1 hour = 120 credits — Two credits a minute adds up to 120 an hour.

What 100, 500 and 800 browser hours cost

The math: on October 26, 2026 prices:

100 hours a month: Browserbase Developer, $20 a month billed monthly. Firecrawl needs 12,000 credits, more than Hobby’s 5,000, so Standard at $83 a month billed yearly or $99 billed monthly. Browserbase costs about a quarter as much.
500 hours a month: Browserbase Startup, $99 a month billed monthly. Firecrawl needs 60,000 credits, inside Standard at $99 a month billed monthly or $83 a month billed yearly. Billed monthly, the two tie. Billed yearly, Firecrawl costs less if every session fits in 10 minutes.
800 hours a month: Browserbase Startup at $99 plus 300 extra hours at $0.10 each, $129 a month billed monthly. Firecrawl needs 96,000 credits, still inside Standard at $83 a month billed yearly or $99 billed monthly.

Prompt-based actions change the Firecrawl side. At 420 credits an hour, Standard’s 100,000 credits cover about 238 hours.

Add the other meters before you decide. Browserbase charges for fetch calls and proxy data past each plan’s included amount. Firecrawl charges 1 credit for each scrape on top of the browser minutes.

Hand-drawn bar chart with three pairs of bars at 100, 500 and 800 hours, Browserbase $20, $99 and $129 a month and Firecrawl $83 a month billed yearly at each, a circle around the point where the bars cross between 100 and 500 hours — With Firecrawl billed yearly, the bars cross between 100 and 500 hours on October 26, 2026 prices.

How to turn your jobs into browser hours

Start from your jobs. A job is one task, such as open a product page, read the price and close.

Time one job by hand. If it takes 1 minute, then 6,000 jobs a month make 100 browser hours. If it takes 5 minutes, 6,000 jobs make 500 hours.

Then check the longest job. If any job runs past 10 minutes, it won’t finish inside one Firecrawl session, and Browserbase is the safer fit for that job.

Sketch of two timelines, the top one a single long bar labelled logged in for an hour on Browserbase, the bottom one a row of short 10-minute bursts labelled Firecrawl, with a stopwatch at each burst’s end — One long session, or a row of short ones.

When the 10-minute cap decides for you

Firecrawl’s 10-minute cap fits jobs that open a page, click and read. It doesn’t fit an agent that logs in and works for an hour.

Garrett Siegel, a developer, described how he splits the work on X on August 7, 2026:

“Firecrawl got me unstuck. Crawl4AI gave me a cleaner boundary: search finds pages, Crawl4AI reads known URLs, the browser handles visual checks.”

Garrett Siegel on X, August 7, 2026

The same split works for cost. Send plain reads to a scraper, and save browser hours for the pages that need a real browser.

What to do this week

Time 10 of your browser jobs and write down the longest one.

If every job finishes in under 10 minutes and you run more than 500 hours a month, start on Firecrawl. Its Free plan’s 1,000 credits cover about 8 browser hours at 120 credits an hour. That is enough to time a real week of jobs. If any job runs longer, or you need about 100 hours, start on Browserbase Developer.

Try Firecrawl

Next · Firecrawl pricing prices every Firecrawl plan · Apify vs Firecrawl compares two hosted scrapers.

Sources · Browserbase pricing, checked October 26, 2026 · Browserbase long sessions docs, read October 26, 2026 · Firecrawl Interact and Firecrawl pricing, both checked October 26, 2026 · Garrett Siegel on X, August 7, 2026.