Skip to main content

Brainiall Web
Turn the open web into clean, structured data

Web data extraction powered by Brainiall Web engine. Point it at a URL and get back clean Markdown β€” the main content, links and metadata, with navigation, ads and boilerplate stripped out. Crawl a whole site within page and depth limits, map every URL from its sitemap, or search the web for a query. Ethical by design: every request honors the site's robots.txt and crawl-delay, and a bot-detection challenge is reported as blocked β€” never bypassed.

How we compare

Web scraping is sold as a credit-metered crawl API (Firecrawl), an HTML-fetch API billed per call (ScrapingBee), a compute-unit automation platform (Apify), or an enterprise data-collection suite (Bright Data). The hyperscalers ship no general web scraping or crawling API at all. Brainiall is one REST call per job β€” scrape, crawl, map or search β€” priced per operation, self-serve from the first call, and ethical by construction.

ProviderShapePricing modelApprox. priceOnboarding
Brainiall WebREST: /scrape /crawl /map /search β€” clean Markdown outPer operation$0.0015 / operationSelf-serve, instant API key
FirecrawlScrape + crawl API; Markdown outputCredit bundles / subscription~$0.003+ / page equivalentSelf-serve, credit-metered
ScrapingBeeHTML / scrape API; credit-meteredCredit bundles / subscription~$0.001–0.007 / callSelf-serve, credit-metered
ApifyActor / automation platform; compute-unit billingSubscription + compute unitsPlan-dependentSelf-serve, subscription
Bright DataEnterprise data-collection & proxy suiteSubscription + usageEnterprise-orientedSales-assisted
AWS / Azure / GCPNo general web scraping or crawling APIβ€”Build it yourselfβ€”

Prices are list-price approximations for orientation, not quotes β€” most scraping vendors price by credits or subscription, so per-operation figures are estimates. Always check each vendor's current terms.

Pricing

One per-operation price for every job β€” scrape, each crawled page, map and search all count the same. The free tier is enough to wire web data into a real pipeline before you pay anything.

Free

$0/mo

100 web operations/month Β· all 4 endpoints Β· no card

Starter

$19/mo

~12,000 operations/month Β· clean Markdown output included

Pro

$79/mo

~60,000 operations/month Β· priority queue Β· 99.5% SLA

Business

$299/mo

~250,000 operations/month Β· dedicated capacity Β· email + Slack support

PAYG: $0.0015 / operation (Brainiall Web engine) β€” a scrape, each page of a crawl, a map and a search are billed the same. No minimum spend, no contract β€” the same single API key and usage-based billing as the rest of the catalog.

Four endpoints

# 1. Scrape β€” one URL into clean Markdown + links + metadata
POST https://api.brainiall.com/v1/web/scrape
  body: {"url": "https://example.com", "formats": ["markdown","links","metadata"]}
  -> {"url": "https://example.com", "title": "Example Domain",
      "markdown": "# Example Domain\n\nThis domain is for use in ...",
      "links": ["https://www.iana.org/domains/example"],
      "metadata": {"description": "...", "lang": "en"},
      "engine": "Brainiall Web engine"}

# 2. Crawl β€” breadth-first within one site, bounded by page + depth caps
POST https://api.brainiall.com/v1/web/crawl
  body: {"url": "https://example.com/docs", "max_pages": 8, "max_depth": 2}
  -> {"start_url": "...", "pages_crawled": 8,
      "pages": [{"url": "...", "title": "...", "markdown": "...", "depth": 0}],
      "skipped": [{"url": "...", "reason": "robots.txt disallow"}]}

# 3. Map β€” enumerate a site's URLs from its sitemap + same-origin links
POST https://api.brainiall.com/v1/web/map
  body: {"url": "https://example.com", "limit": 50}
  -> {"site": "https://example.com", "url_count": 50,
      "urls": ["https://example.com/", "..."], "source": "sitemap"}

# 4. Search β€” a query into a ranked list of web results
POST https://api.brainiall.com/v1/web/search
  body: {"query": "open source web scraping", "max_results": 10}
  -> {"query": "...", "result_count": 10,
      "results": [{"rank": 1, "title": "...", "url": "...", "snippet": "..."}]}

Every endpoint is one synchronous REST call. crawl and map take page and depth limits so a job always finishes in bounded time β€” and a crawl stays on the origin site, never wandering off-domain.

How Brainiall Web works

One call does the fetching, the cleanup and the structuring β€” you get data, not raw HTML to untangle.

  • Main content, not boilerplate. A main-content pass strips the navigation, ads, cookie banners and footers and keeps the article, doc or post β€” then converts it to clean Markdown ready to feed an LLM or a search index.
  • Bounded crawls. A crawl walks a site breadth-first within page and depth caps and a wall-time budget, stays same-origin, and reports every URL it had to skip and why.
  • Sitemap-aware mapping. map reads sitemap.xml β€” including nested sitemap indexes β€” and falls back to same-origin link discovery when a site publishes no sitemap.
  • Ethical by construction. Every target URL is checked against the site's robots.txt before any fetch, the published crawl-delay is honored, and a CAPTCHA or bot-detection challenge is reported as blocked β€” never solved or bypassed.
  • Safe by default. URLs that resolve to private, loopback or internal addresses are refused, so the endpoint can never be turned against your own infrastructure.

What it's for

  • LLM & RAG pipelines: turn documentation sites, articles and knowledge bases into clean Markdown context for retrieval and generation.
  • Market & competitive research: pull pricing, catalog and news pages on a schedule and feed them straight into analysis.
  • Knowledge bases: crawl a whole documentation site into a single searchable corpus, then keep it fresh.
  • Lead & content enrichment: scrape a company's public site for structured facts to enrich a CRM or a dataset.
  • Change monitoring: re-scrape a page on a cadence and diff the Markdown to catch what changed.
  • One bill, one key: same Brainiall API key and usage-based billing as the rest of the catalog β€” no separate scraping vendor to procure.

Press kit & resources

What reviewers, integrators and procurement teams typically ask for.

OpenAPI spec

The machine-readable OpenAPI 3.1 definition for the whole catalog, including all four web endpoints and their schemas.

View spec

API reference

OpenAPI spec, the request/response schema for each endpoint, error codes and rate limits.

Read docs β†’

Try it now

Free API key in 30 seconds β€” 100 web operations/month, no card.

Get a key β†’

Compare the catalog

How Brainiall's specialty APIs line up against AWS, Azure and the specialists, use case by use case.

See the comparison β†’

More specialty APIs

Same single API key, same usage-based pricing, different problem solved.

Get your free API key in 30 seconds

Start free β†’
Brainiall Web β€” Brainiall (ethical web scraping, crawling & search; clean Markdown for LLMs; Firecrawl / ScrapingBee alternative) | Brainiall