Last updated: 2026-07-01
Context.dev is a web scraping and brand data API for AI agents, founded in 2025 and backed by Y Combinator. Plans start free with 500 credits and scale to $149/month for 200,000 credits. It extracts clean markdown, logos, colors, fonts, and company data from any domain in one call, with an MCP server for Claude and Cursor. Trusted by 5,000+ companies including Mintlify and Klarna.
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. The core mechanism is a credit-based REST API that accepts any domain or URL and returns clean, structured output. A single call to the scrape endpoint converts a web page to clean markdown or HTML with navigation and ads stripped. A brand lookup call returns logos in SVG and PNG, hex color palettes, font families with weight variants, social handles across 25+ platforms, industry codes (EIC, NAICS, SIC), and firmographic data. Design system extraction returns spacing, shadow, and typography tokens as typed JSON. Bot detection and proxy escalation are automatic on all plans, so developers do not manage proxy pools. The tool is used by three primary workflows: feeding clean web content into RAG pipelines, enriching customer or lead records with brand and company data during onboarding, and powering no-code automations via Zapier, Make, Google Sheets, and Excel. An MCP server lets AI agents in Claude, Cursor, and VS Code call Context.dev endpoints directly without any REST plumbing. Typed SDKs are available for TypeScript, Python, Ruby, and Go. Pricing scales from a free tier with 500 credits and 10,000 Logo Link CDN requests to the Scale plan at $949/month for 2.5 million credits. Web scrape endpoints cost 1 credit per call; brand API calls cost 10 credits. Rate limits range from 10 calls/minute on the free tier to 1,200 calls/minute on Scale. A 30% startup discount is available for early-stage companies. Approximately 60% of brand lookups return cached results in under 1 second; first-time domain crawls typically complete in 7 seconds at the p50 level.
Pricing
Free: 500 credits + 10,000 Logo Link requests, no credit card required. Starter: $49/mo for 30,000 credits at 120 calls/min. Pro: $149/mo for 200,000 credits at 300 calls/min. Scale: $949/mo for 2.5M credits at 1,200 calls/min. Web endpoints: 1 credit/call; Brand API: 10 credits/call. 30% startup discount available.
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.
- 60% of brand lookups return cached results in under 1 second, with p50 cold-crawl latency of 7 seconds, making it viable for real-time onboarding flows.
- Free tier includes 500 credits and 10,000 CDN requests with no credit card required, letting teams evaluate brand extraction and scraping before any commitment.
Cons
- Brand API calls cost 10 credits each vs. 1 credit for scraping, so heavy enrichment workloads on the free or Starter plan exhaust credits quickly (500 free credits = only 50 brand lookups).
- 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 is Context.dev and what does it do?
Context.dev is a web scraping and brand intelligence API built for AI agents and developer teams, founded in 2025 by Yahia Bakour in New York City and backed by Y Combinator. It converts any URL or domain into structured, AI-ready data through a single REST endpoint. The platform offers four main capabilities: page scraping to clean markdown or HTML, full-site crawling, brand asset extraction (logos, colors, fonts, social handles), and design system parsing. Over 5,000 companies use it, including Mintlify, Klarna, Daily.dev, and Vizzy. All plans include automatic bot detection and proxy escalation, so developers do not manage proxy pools themselves. An MCP server lets AI agents in Claude, Cursor, and VS Code call Context.dev endpoints directly without writing REST plumbing code.
How much does Context.dev cost in 2026?
Context.dev uses a credit-based pricing model with four tiers. The Free plan includes 500 credits and 10,000 Logo Link CDN requests per month with no credit card required. The Starter plan costs $49/month for 30,000 credits at a rate limit of 120 calls/minute. The Pro plan costs $149/month for 200,000 credits at 300 calls/minute. The Scale plan costs $949/month for 2.5 million credits at 1,200 calls/minute. Credit consumption varies by endpoint type: web scraping and crawl endpoints cost 1 credit per call, while Brand API calls (logo retrieval, color extraction, font detection) cost 10 credits each. A 30% startup discount is available for early-stage companies on request.
What are the main features of Context.dev?
Context.dev's four core feature areas are web scraping, site crawling, brand extraction, and design system parsing. The scraping endpoint converts any URL to clean markdown or HTML with navigation, ads, and boilerplate stripped out in one call. The crawl endpoint traverses an entire website's sitemap and returns multi-page markdown without extra configuration. Brand lookups return logos in SVG and PNG, hex color palettes, font families with weight variants, social handles across 25+ platforms, stock ticker data, and industry classification codes. Design system extraction returns spacing tokens, shadow definitions, and typography as typed JSON. The platform also ships an MCP server for Claude, Cursor, and VS Code, plus no-code connectors for Zapier, Make, Google Sheets, and Excel. Typed SDKs are available for TypeScript, Python, Ruby, and Go.
Is Context.dev free to use?
Yes, Context.dev has a free tier that requires no credit card. The free plan includes 500 credits and 10,000 Logo Link CDN requests per month. Web scraping and crawl calls cost 1 credit each, so the free tier supports up to 500 page scrapes per month. Brand API calls cost 10 credits each, so the free tier supports up to 50 brand lookups. The free plan has a rate limit of 10 calls/minute. There is no stated time limit on the free tier, so teams can evaluate both the scraping and brand extraction features before committing to a paid plan. For heavier usage, the Starter plan at $49/month provides 30,000 credits and a 120 calls/minute rate limit.
What are the best alternatives to Context.dev?
The closest alternatives to Context.dev are Firecrawl, Jina AI Reader, and Brandfetch, each strong in a different dimension. Firecrawl focuses exclusively on web scraping and crawling for AI use cases, with plans from $16/month and an open-source self-hosted option, making it a better fit when you only need scraping and want lower per-page cost. Jina AI Reader offers a zero-configuration URL-to-markdown conversion with no API key needed for basic use, but lacks brand extraction or design system parsing. Brandfetch specializes in brand data (logos, colors, fonts) at lower per-lookup cost, but does not include web scraping or crawling. Context.dev wins when a team needs all three capabilities (scraping, enrichment, and brand data) under one API key and credit pool without managing multiple vendor integrations.
Who is Context.dev best for?
Context.dev is best for AI agent developers, growth engineers, and SaaS product teams who need structured web data as part of an automated pipeline. AI agent builders use it to feed clean markdown into RAG systems or to give agents real-time web context via the MCP server. Growth engineers use the brand enrichment endpoint to auto-populate CRM records with company logos, industry codes, and social profiles during lead capture. SaaS onboarding teams use it to pre-fill brand assets when a new customer connects their domain. It is not well-suited for non-technical teams without API integration experience, or for enterprises requiring documented SOC 2 compliance before procurement. Teams with very high brand-enrichment volume should model credit burn carefully, as 10 credits per brand call can exhaust Starter-plan budgets quickly.
Does Context.dev have an API?
Yes, Context.dev is API-first. It exposes a REST API over HTTPS with bearer-token authentication on all plans. Typed SDKs are available for TypeScript/Node, Python, Ruby, and Go, each with fully typed response models. The API covers four endpoint groups: web scraping (single-page markdown or HTML), site crawling (multi-page markdown), brand intelligence (logos, colors, fonts, firmographics), and design system extraction. Rate limits range from 10 calls/minute on the free tier to 1,200 calls/minute on the Scale plan. Context.dev also ships an MCP server (npx context.dev-mcp) that exposes all endpoints to MCP-compatible AI agents in Claude, Cursor, and VS Code without any REST client code. No-code integrations via Zapier, Make, Google Sheets, and Excel are also available for teams that do not write code.
How does Context.dev compare to Exa in 2026?
Context.dev and Exa both help AI agents retrieve web data, but they solve different problems. Exa is a neural search engine that ranks and retrieves web content by semantic similarity, making it strong when you need to find relevant documents across the web rather than scrape a specific URL. Context.dev is a structured data extractor that converts a known URL or domain into clean markdown, brand assets, and company data, making it strong when you already know which page or domain you need to process. Context.dev adds brand extraction (logos, colors, fonts) and design system parsing that Exa does not offer at all. For cost, Context.dev's free tier (500 credits) compares to Exa's limited free tier, with paid plans at $49-$949/month vs. Exa's API subscription tiers. Choose Context.dev for structured enrichment pipelines where the target URL is known; choose Exa for open-web semantic search where the relevant page must be discovered.
Top Alternatives
- Exa: Pick Context.dev if you need brand asset extraction (logos, colors, fonts) alongside scraping; choose Exa when you need neural web search with semantic ranking over raw content retrieval.
- Perplexity: Pick Context.dev for structured data extraction in code; choose Perplexity when the end consumer is a human who needs cited, conversational answers rather than JSON output.
- LangChain: Pick Context.dev for a managed, rate-limited scraping endpoint with no infrastructure to run; choose LangChain when you need a full orchestration framework and are comfortable hosting your own data loaders.