Firecrawl, the San Francisco company that turns websites into clean data for AI agents, is opening a year of extra credits to any startup on an annual plan.
Co-founder Eric Ciarla posted the offer on Wednesday. Startups get twice their monthly credits for 12 months, with extra usage capped at $2,500 a month and $30,000 over the year. On a Standard plan, that is 200,000 credits a month instead of 100,000. The package includes a Slack channel with Firecrawl's team and company swag. Existing annual customers can claim it. Applicants are directed to firecrawl.dev/startups.
The move follows a richer package Ciarla announced last week for Y Combinator companies. Firecrawl itself came out of YC's S22 batch. Current YC companies get five times their monthly credits for a year; alumni get 2.5 times. Both programs share the same dollar cap.
Firecrawl sells search, scrape, and page-interaction APIs that return markdown and structured JSON instead of raw HTML. The code is open source. A hosted engine handles proxies, JavaScript rendering, and the cases where an agent has to click or fill a form. Developers can call the API from Python or Node, or connect it to Cursor, Claude Code, and other agents through an official MCP server and CLI. The founders first built Mendable, a "chat with your data" product used by Coinbase, Snap, and MongoDB, then pulled the scraping layer into its own company after they kept hitting the same snag: models need current web pages, and assembling that pipeline is tedious.
Ciarla is chief growth officer, working with chief executive Caleb Peffer and chief technology officer Nicolas Silberstein Camara. Firecrawl's site currently lists more than 1.25 million developers signed up, 150,000 companies, 5 billion requests served, and more than 150,000 GitHub stars. It also reports 2.5 million weekly downloads of its SDKs on npm and PyPI. Named customers include Zapier, Replit, Shopify, Lovable, Gamma, and Canva.
In August 2025 the company raised a $14.5 million Series A led by Nexus Venture Partners, bringing total funding to $16.2 million. Y Combinator, Zapier, Shopify chief executive Tobias Lütke, Postman chief executive Abhinav Asthana, and Mux founder Matt McClure joined the round. On its Y Combinator profile, Firecrawl says it reached eight figures of annual revenue in its first year and more than doubled that in its second.
Agents that crawl the live web burn credits quickly. By extending the YC playbook to a wider set of startups, Firecrawl is betting that cheaper, better-supported usage now turns into lasting customers later.
