Firecrawl MCP vs Linkup

Firecrawl MCP

Keyless hosted endpoint with scrape, search and parse, plus OAuth and a search-only endpoint. No x402 or other machine payment.

Linkup

Per-call prices from $0.005, and no credit taken for errors, missing parameters or empty results. 429 covers both exhausted credit and rate limiting, with no Retry-After.

Firecrawl MCP

1. Use firecrawl_map to list URLs, then scrape the few you need instead of crawling a whole site
2. On the keyless endpoint only scrape, search and parse work. A 429 carries a signup_url for the human
3. Ask for markdown only. JSON, question and highlight formats add 4 credits a page
4. Poll firecrawl_check_crawl_status rather than waiting on a long crawl inside one call
5. Check the URL before scraping. Dead pages still cost a credit

Linkup

1. On 429, check the credit balance before backing off. The same code means out of credit
2. Pass reasoningDepth: "S" to research unless you need more. The MCP default is L at $1.50
3. Start with depth=fast and outputType=searchResults. Deep costs $0.05, ten times as much
4. Send the key as an Authorization: Bearer header, not ?apiKey= or a command-line argument
5. Poll linkup-get-research with the task id. Research runs take minutes