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Verified Free / Data & APIs

Is Common Crawl actually free?

Truly Free
How free95/100
Value8/10
How these scores work
Free Score (0–100) follows a fixed rubric: cards up front, auto-billing, hard time cutoffs, withheld core features, and paying with your data or attention all deduct points. 90–100 truly free · 70–89 free forever · 45–69 squeezed · 15–44 trial mechanics · under 15 fake or gone. Value (0–10) is editorial: real-world worth of the free offering measured against its paid equivalent. Full rubric on the methodology page.

Yes, the archive is genuinely free. What isn't free is the compute and bandwidth to do anything with several petabytes of it.

What it’s worth

The raw material behind a great many search and AI products, given away by a nonprofit.

What you get free

  • Petabytes of crawled web pages, updated monthly
  • Raw pages, extracted text and metadata indexes
  • Free access from public cloud storage
  • No licence fee and no usage agreement to sign

In practice: a free, enormous snapshot of the public web — for people who already know how to handle data at that scale.

Drawbacks

  • Scale makes casual use impractical
  • Careless egress can cost real money — the data is free, moving it isn't
  • Crawl coverage is broad but not complete

Also paywalled

  • Nothing — but compute to process it is on you

What the free tier actually gives you

Card requiredNo
Free ceilingUnlimited
API key neededNo
Bulk downloadYes
Commercial useAllowed
Self-hostableYes
Sleeps when idleNever

Same questions, same order, for every listing in Data & APIs — so you can compare them side by side. Deliberately no exact allowances: those change monthly, the shape of the limit doesn't.

Free facts

VerdictTruly Free
Card requiredNo
Auto-bills—
AccountNone needed
LimitsNone from Common Crawl; your own storage and egress are the limit
The real costNothing to access. Processing petabytes is where your money goes.

The catch

The download costs nothing and the processing costs plenty. Pulling a full monthly crawl out of cloud storage can generate a serious egress bill — with the wrong setup that's a four-figure surprise.

The smart play

  • Use the URL index to fetch only the pages you want instead of downloading crawls whole
  • Run your processing in the same cloud region as the data so egress stays near zero
  • Start with the extracted-text files rather than raw WARC unless you need the HTML

Common questions

Does Common Crawl require a credit card?
No — Common Crawl does not ask for a card to use the free version. Auto-billing: —.
What are the limits of Common Crawl's free plan?
None from Common Crawl; your own storage and egress are the limit. The download costs nothing and the processing costs plenty. Pulling a full monthly crawl out of cloud storage can generate a serious egress bill — with the wrong setup that's a four-figure surprise.
How do I use Common Crawl without paying?
Use the URL index to fetch only the pages you want instead of downloading crawls whole Run your processing in the same cloud region as the data so egress stays near zero Start with the extracted-text files rather than raw WARC unless you need the HTML
What does Common Crawl really cost?
Nothing to access. Processing petabytes is where your money goes.
Why is Common Crawl free?
Nothing to access. Processing petabytes is where your money goes. The raw material behind a great many search and AI products, given away by a nonprofit.
Is Common Crawl still free?
As of our last check, yes. Yes, the archive is genuinely free. What isn't free is the compute and bandwidth to do anything with several petabytes of it. Free tiers change without notice, which is why every page here carries the date it was checked.

More info — tap to expand

The free thing that can still generate a bill
This is the clearest example on the site of free data with an expensive shadow. Common Crawl charges nothing. Your cloud provider charges for every byte leaving its network. Process in-region, filter with the index first, and the bill stays near zero — do it naively and it won't.

Last checked: August 2026site-wide date · Verdict: Truly Free — no card, no account wall, no meaningful catch. use it and go.

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Free tiers change without notice. If you have just used it, you know something we don't.

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