The short version
- The free version supports useful checks on up to 500 URLs, with feature restrictions such as no JavaScript rendering.
- The licence is €245 per user per year, dropping to €209 at twenty or more licences.
- You need the licence when your site exceeds 500 URLs, or when you need scheduling, custom extraction and saved configurations.
- For a one-off audit of a small site, free is genuinely sufficient, not a crippled demo.
Screaming Frog’s free tier supports useful checks on up to 500 URLs. It has feature restrictions as well as a crawl limit: JavaScript rendering, saving crawls, custom extraction and integrations require a licence. A small site can still get valuable basic crawl evidence without paying.
The boundary
Licences are per user per year, with bulk discounts on purchases of five or more at a time. Read from the vendor page on the date shown.
Feature availability between tiers changes between releases. Confirm on the vendor page before deciding on the basis of any single row.
The rows that usually force the purchase are custom extraction and saved configurations. Custom extraction lets you answer questions specific to your site, which product pages lack a particular schema field, which templates are missing a canonical. Saved configurations matter once you crawl regularly and do not want to rebuild settings each time.
When to buy
- Your site exceeds 500 URLs. The most common trigger and a hard one.
- You crawl more than occasionally. Saved configurations and scheduling save real time.
- You need custom extraction to answer a site-specific question.
- You do this professionally. €245 a year is trivial against any consulting rate.
- You want Search Console data inside the crawl, which makes prioritisation far easier.
What the 500-URL limit actually covers
The limit counts URLs crawled, not pages you think you have, and those diverge more than people expect. A twenty-page brochure site can exceed 500 URLs once images, CSS, JavaScript files and pagination are included, while a 400-post blog with clean architecture may stay comfortably under it.
You have some control over that. Excluding images and other resources from the crawl configuration concentrates the allowance on HTML pages, which is what you are auditing. If you still exceed it, the subfolder approach below lets you audit a section at a time. Between the two, small sites can get useful basic crawl evidence without paying, while rendering, logs and field data need separate checks, which is the strongest argument for starting here rather than with a subscription. See the full free stack.
Memory is the practical ceiling on the paid version rather than any licence limit. Because the crawler runs locally and holds the crawl in RAM by default, very large sites will exhaust an ordinary laptop before they exhaust anything the vendor imposes. Switching to database storage mode handles larger crawls at the cost of speed, which is worth knowing before you conclude a crawl of a big site is impossible.
Crawl a subfolder to stay under the limit
If your site is over 500 URLs but you only need to audit one section, configure the crawl to include a specific path. It is a legitimate way to get real value from the free tier on a larger site, and it is how a lot of people evaluate whether the licence is worth buying.