Last updated: 2026-08-19
Context.dev is a brand and web data API spanning four endpoint groups: page scraping, full-site crawling, brand-asset extraction, and design-token parsing, all under one credit pool. It differs from pure search tools by also returning company brand data: logos, colors, fonts, and firmographics, alongside clean markdown for AI agents and RAG pipelines.
About Context.dev
Context.dev is a web scraping and brand intelligence API built for AI agents and developer teams who need structured, real-time web data without maintaining custom scrapers. Founded in 2025 by Yahia Bakour in New York City and backed by Y Combinator, the platform bundles page scraping, site crawling, brand asset extraction, and company enrichment under one API key and one credit pool. Over 5,000 companies use it, including Mintlify, Klarna, Daily.dev, and Vizzy.
Three groups adopt it: AI agent builders feeding clean content into RAG pipelines, growth and onboarding teams enriching customer records with brand data, and no-code teams automating workflows without writing scrapers. The extraction engine is rule-based rather than a generative model, so output stays deterministic across repeated calls to the same domain.
Pricing
Free tier requires no credit card. Starter: $49/mo for 30,000 credits at 120 calls/min. Pro: $149/mo for 200,000 credits at 300 calls/min.
5M credits at 1,200 calls/min. Web endpoints cost less per call than Brand API endpoints. 30% startup discount available.
| Tier | Monthly price | What it includes |
|---|---|---|
| Free | Free | |
| Starter | $49/mo | |
| Pro | $149/mo | |
| Scale | $949/mo |
Key Features
- Web Scraping to Clean Markdown: Converts any URL to clean markdown or HTML in one API call, stripping navigation, ads, and boilerplate, with automatic bot detection and proxy escalation built in.
- Brand Intelligence Extraction: Returns logos (SVG and PNG), hex color palettes, fonts with weight variants, social handles across 25+ platforms, and industry codes from a single domain lookup.
- Design System Extraction: Parses any website's colors, typography, spacing tokens, and shadow definitions into structured JSON in one API call, cutting design audit time from hours to seconds.
- Full-Site Crawling: Crawls an entire website's sitemap and returns multi-page markdown in one request, handling JS-rendered pages and pagination without additional configuration.
- MCP Server for AI Agents: An installable MCP server (npx context.dev-mcp) lets Claude, Cursor, and VS Code agents call all Context.dev endpoints directly without writing REST client code.
- No-Code Integrations: Native connectors for Zapier, Make, Google Sheets, and Excel let non-developer teams run web scraping and brand enrichment workflows without any code.
- Logo Link CDN: A direct-embed CDN URL serves optimized company logos at any size with automatic fallbacks, included free with 10,000 requests/month on the free plan.
Pros
- One API key covers scraping, crawling, brand extraction, and design system parsing, eliminating the need to stitch together 3+ vendors for common AI agent data workflows.
- MCP server ships with zero configuration: run npx context.dev-mcp and agents in Claude, Cursor, and VS Code can call all endpoints immediately.
- Brand lookup cache hit rate keeps most repeat calls under 1 second, making it viable for real-time onboarding flows.
- Free tier requires no credit card, letting teams evaluate brand extraction and scraping before any commitment.
Cons
- Brand API calls cost far more credits per call than scraping calls, so heavy enrichment workloads exhaust the free or Starter credit pool quickly.
- First-time domain crawls can take up to 60 seconds at the p99 level, which is a blocking latency for synchronous user-facing flows that expect sub-second brand data.
- No fine-grained usage analytics dashboard on lower tiers, making it difficult for teams to forecast credit burn before hitting rate limits or overages.
- Compliance certifications (SOC 2, ISO 27001) are not publicly listed on the website, which may block procurement at regulated enterprises that require documented attestations.
Frequently Asked Questions
What are Context.dev's pricing plans in 2026?
Context.dev has four tiers on top of a free plan. Starter is $49/month for 30,000 credits at 120 calls/minute, Pro is $149/month for 200,000 credits at 300 calls/minute, and Scale is $949/month for 2.5 million credits at 1,200 calls/minute. Scraping calls cost 1 credit each; Brand API calls cost 10 credits each, and a 30% startup discount is available on request.
What do you get on Context.dev's free tier?
500 credits a month plus 10,000 Logo Link CDN requests, rate-limited to 10 calls a minute and with no card at signup. Scraping burns 1 credit per call, so that is around 500 pages; Brand API lookups cost 10 credits each, which works out to roughly 50 of them. Mixing the two splits the same allowance.
Which tools compete with Context.dev in 2026?
Firecrawl is a narrower, cheaper option focused only on scraping and crawling, with plans from $16/month and a self-hosted open-source option. Jina AI Reader offers zero-configuration URL-to-markdown conversion with no API key needed for basic use, but has no brand extraction. Brandfetch specializes in brand data at a lower per-lookup cost but does not scrape or crawl pages.
Is Context.dev better than Exa?
Exa is a neural search engine that ranks and retrieves relevant pages by semantic similarity, which suits open-web discovery when the target page is unknown. Context.dev instead converts a known URL or domain into structured markdown and company data, adding logo, color, and font extraction that Exa does not offer.
How do you set up Context.dev?
Sign up at context.dev for a free API key with no credit card required. Install a typed SDK for TypeScript, Python, Ruby, or Go, or call the REST endpoint directly with a target URL or domain. Cached domains typically return data in under a second.
Top Alternatives
- Exa: Exa is a neural search engine for when you do not know which page holds the answer. Context.dev starts from a URL you already have and returns markdown plus brand assets.
- Perplexity: Perplexity answers a person, with citations and prose. Context.dev answers a program, with structured JSON.
- LangChain: LangChain is the framework you assemble and host yourself. Context.dev is a managed endpoint with the rate limits already drawn.
HokAI guides covering Context.dev
- Context.dev vs You.com: Which Should You Use in 2026?: Both now sell web search and page extraction in 2026. Context.dev bundles brand data for $25/month; You.com alone has a published search-accuracy benchmark.
- Best AI Search & Retrieval Infrastructure Tools in 2026: AI search and retrieval infrastructure is four purchases, not one: web search, document parsing, vector storage, and agent memory. Compare eight tools by layer.
- Algolia and You.com Both Call Themselves AI Search Infrastructure. They Aren't Rivals.: Algolia and You.com both market themselves as AI search infrastructure in 2026, but Algolia indexes data you own while You.com searches the live web for agents.