Two AI-friendly crawlers built for modern web ingestion. crawlcrawl ships the complete platform (crawl, search, screenshot, transform, render, LLMs.txt builder, AI-bot audit, dataset storage, diff endpoint) at every paid tier from $15 a month.
| Workload | crawlcrawl plan | cost/mo | Olostep plan | cost/mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| 10,000 requests / month | Pro | $15 | Starter + overage | ~$29 |
| 100,000 requests / month | Studio (100k) | $69 | Standard (200k) | $99 |
| 500,000 requests / month | Agency (500k) | $279 | Scale (1M) | $399 |
| 1,000,000 requests / month | Scale (1M) | $499 | Scale (1M) | $399 |
Source: live pricing pages, verified 2026-05-16. At entry-paid and mid-tier workloads, the credit-cap-vs-workload math favors crawlcrawl. Olostep Starter at $9 covers only 5,000 requests, which forces buyers running 10,000 requests/mo into either credit packs or the $99 Standard tier. At very high volumes, Olostep can land lower on raw price; crawlcrawl wins on platform breadth and feature inclusion.
| Capability | crawlcrawl | Olostep |
|---|---|---|
| Multi-page crawl with link discovery | Included | Included |
| JavaScript rendering, included by default | Included | Included |
| 190+ country routing | Included | Standard |
| Stored crawl datasets (paginated retrieval) | Included | Not advertised |
| Change-detection diff between runs | Included | Not advertised |
| Orphan / link-graph extraction | Included | Not advertised |
| Schema.org / OG / JSON-LD in same response | Same pass as markdown | Separate parsing |
| Scheduled crawls with cron | Included | Not advertised |
| HMAC-signed webhooks with retry | Included | Not advertised |
| LLMs.txt builder | Included | No |
| AI-bot policy resolver | Included | No |
| Live search API under same key | Included | No |
| Screenshot API | Included | Limited |
| Transform API (HTML/PDF to markdown) | Included | Not advertised |
| Per-site pre-built scrapers | Included | Limited |
| Permanent free tier (no expiry) | 1,000 credits/mo, every month | 500 requests one-time trial |
| API key rotation with grace window | Included | Not exposed |
Olostep is one of the more accessible newer entrants to the managed crawler space. Their $9 starter tier is genuinely a low-friction entry point for hobbyist and side-project workloads, and the high concurrency at the entry tier (150 concurrent requests) is unusual for a sub-$10 plan. For teams whose workload truly fits inside 5,000 requests per month and whose use case is straightforward scraping rather than full RAG ingestion, Olostep is a credible choice worth evaluating.
If you are running production RAG ingestion, content monitoring with change detection, scheduled refreshes, SEO audits across many sites, or AEO infrastructure (llms.txt, AI-bot policy, structured signals), the features that matter are the ones crawlcrawl ships at every paid tier from $15 a month. The 1,000-credit permanent free tier means you can validate the fit before any bill arrives, and the integrated platform replaces three or four single-purpose tools.
"We cut our security asset-discovery pipeline from eight services to one. The dataset diff endpoint is what closed the deal."— Rajesh Meta, Co-founder & CTO, Quick ZTNA
"We index documentation across forty vendor sites every week. crawlcrawl made it boring infrastructure, and that is the highest compliment I can give a tool."— Amit Tanwar, Founder, Networkers Home
At the absolute entry tier, Olostep Starter is $9 vs crawlcrawl Pro at $15. The difference closes once you measure at a workload size. Olostep Starter caps at 5,000 requests; production teams running 10,000 requests per month land at ~$29 on Olostep (Starter plus credit pack) vs $15 on crawlcrawl Pro for the same workload.
Dataset storage with paginated retrieval, change-detection diff between runs, orphan and link-graph extraction, scheduled crawls with cron-style cadence, HMAC-signed webhooks with retry, the LLMs.txt builder, AI-bot policy resolver, live search API, transform API for HTML/PDF, and a permanent (not trial) free tier. Plus structured-data signals returned in the same response as markdown.
For RAG specifically, the features that matter most are clean markdown, structured-data signals alongside content, multi-page crawl orchestration, scheduled refresh, and change-detection diff. crawlcrawl ships all of these at every paid tier; Olostep covers the fetching layer but leaves the other primitives to the customer to build.
1,000 credits per month, every month, no card required, permanent. Use it for as long as the volume covers your workload. Olostep's free tier is a 500-request one-time trial rather than a recurring monthly allotment.
Both platforms have credit-based, REST-shaped APIs. For most workloads, migration is a base-URL and authentication-header change. For workloads using Olostep-specific parameters, the migration is a small refactor.
1,000 credits per month, every month, no card required. Upgrade to Pro at $15 when you are ready.