Olostep
Olostep is a web scraping API that searches, scrapes, crawls, maps, and answers from one API key for AI agents.
For agent and RAG work where the bill is the constraint, Olostep is one of the cheaper credible options: $99/mo for 200K requests works out to about $0.399 per 1K, and the 2026 storage parameter kills the re-fetch loop that quietly doubles ingest costs elsewhere. It wins on endpoint breadth and price, not on enterprise paperwork. If procurement, SOC 2, or on-prem is a gate, look past it.
Verified 1d ago · liveness 87/100 · cite: rightaichoice.com/tools/olostep
- AI agent and RAG developers who want live web grounding from a single API key
- Data engineering teams batching thousands of URLs who need concurrency and clean output formats
- Brand and competitive-intel teams monitoring pricing or content changes on a schedule
- Teams using Claude Code, Cursor, or Windsurf that want web access through an MCP server
- Marketers who want a point-and-click scraper with spreadsheet export and no code
- Enterprises requiring a cleared SOC 2, on-prem deployment, or procurement-gated review
- Anyone planning hundred-thousand-page crawls on Starter, where 150 concurrent requests throttle
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Skip Olostep if you need a point-and-click scraper with spreadsheet export, a hosted marketplace of prebuilt actors, or documented SOC 2 / on-prem deployment — it is a raw API key you integrate yourself.
Successful requests are what you are billed for, so a 5,000-request Starter plan at $9/mo can be consumed faster than expected if you re-scrape the same pages instead of using the storage parameter.
Olostep sits at the cheap end of the web-data API market. Starter at $9/mo with 5,000 requests and $1.800 per 1K undercuts most equivalents, and $99/mo Standard at 200K requests drops the effective rate to $0.399 per 1K — genuinely competitive at production scale. It is built for solo developers and small-to-mid teams; enterprises that need SOC 2 or on-prem deployment generally end up on pricier vendors with compliance packaging they can actually sign off on.
In short
Olostep — Olostep is a web scraping API that searches, scrapes, crawls, maps, and answers from one API key for AI agents. Best for AI agent and RAG developers who want live web grounding from a single API key, Data engineering teams batching thousands of URLs who need concurrency and clean output formats, Brand and competitive-intel teams monitoring pricing or content changes on a schedule. Free to start; paid plans from $9/mo.
No head-to-head comparison for Olostep yet — the alternatives below are the closest matches we list.
What's new in Olostep
Checked 4 days agoAcross the latest 8 updates: 1 feature update and 7 news mentions.
Olostep blog covers information retrieval basics
Explainer on how search systems retrieve information, part of Olostep's educational content series.
Olostep publishes explainer on data transformation
Beginner's guide to data transformation with examples, posted to the Olostep blog.
Olostep publishes AEO and AI search tool comparisons
Posts compare AEO tools, AI search monitoring tools, and explain answer engine optimization.
Tutorial: building an AI stock signal analyzer with Olostep and TypeSafe
Walkthrough of an AI stock signal analyzer built on Olostep's API and TypeSafe.
Olostep lists 10 agentic AI projects buildable on its API
Roundup of agentic AI project ideas using Olostep for web search, extraction and structuring.
Tutorial: monitoring any website for changes with Olostep
Guide on setting up automated website change monitoring using Olostep.
Olostep publishes MCP server roundups for major AI coding tools
Series ranks MCP servers for Cursor, Claude Code, Codex CLI, Windsurf, Gemini CLI and others.
Olostep adds storage parameter for persistent extraction results
New storage parameter lets requests set retention via expires_in: 10d to 365d, or never. Default stays at ~7 days.
What people actually say about Olostep — is it worth it?
We scanned public community sources for Olostep on Oct 14, 2026 and could not establish that the discussion we found is about this tool rather than something else sharing its name. Only 1 of the posts we fetched could be positively tied to Olostep. Rather than publish a sentiment score built on the wrong subject, we publish nothing here and re-run the scan.
Viability Score
How well maintained and how widely used is Olostep? Built from what the vendor actually publishes (docs, changelog, tutorials, integrations, pricing), whether the site is live, and how much real users discuss it. How we calculate this
Last calculated: October 2026
How we score →Key Features
- Scrape any URL into Markdown, HTML, JSON, or screenshots
- Crawl sites with max_pages cap, include/exclude URL patterns, and external-link control
- Map a domain's URL structure with a top_n limit and automatic pagination
- Natural-language Web Search API returning ranked links, snippets, and source URLs
- Answer API: AI-synthesised answers with citations and optional JSON schema shaping
- Monitors API: watch pages for content changes on a schedule
- Storage parameter on /scrapes: persist extractions 10d to 365d, or never
- Batch up to 10k URLs per job; vendor quotes 100k URLs in 5-7 minutes
- JavaScript rendering and residential IP rotation on every request
- Native Python SDK (pip install olostep)
- Native Node.js SDK (npm i olostep)
- CLI with JSON output for scripts and CI
- MCP server for Claude, Cursor, and VS Code
- Drop-in skills for Claude Code, Cursor, and Windsurf
- Prepackaged parsers like @olostep/google-search for JSON extraction
About Olostep
Olostep bundles the whole live-web pipeline behind a single key: /scrapes returns clean Markdown, HTML, JSON, or screenshots from any URL; /crawls walks a site with max_pages caps and include/exclude URL patterns; /maps enumerates a domain's URLs with a top_n limit; /searches does natural-language web search returning ranked links and snippets; /answers synthesises cited responses; and /monitors watches pages for changes on a schedule. It's built for people shipping retrieval into software rather than pulling data by hand. Every request runs with JavaScript rendering and residential IP rotation, so dynamically loaded pages come back populated instead of blank. Native Python (pip install olostep) and Node.js (npm i olostep) clients share an object-oriented shape, with cURL/REST underneath, a CLI, and an MCP server for Claude, Cursor, and VS Code. Batches move up to 10k URLs in one job per the docs, with the vendor quoting 100k URLs in 5-7 minutes on its own bare-metal setup. The June 2026 changelog added a storage parameter: set expires_in to 10d, 30d, 60d, 90d, 180d, 365d, or never and your extraction is persisted, so a pipeline can extract once and re-query instead of paying to fetch the same page again. The default retention stays around 7 days. Webhook events push async results back, and prepackaged parsers (e.g. @olostep/google-search) turn common sources into JSON without custom selectors. Pricing is disclosed on the site and leans cheap: a $0 trial with 500 successful requests, $9/mo Starter (5,000 requests, 150 concurrent), $99/mo Standard (200K requests, 500 concurrent, $0.399 per 1K), $399/mo Scale (1M requests plus AI Browser Automations), six-month credit packs from $20, and a contact-sales Enterprise tier. Against Firecrawl and Apify it competes on per-request cost and endpoint breadth rather than enterprise compliance depth or a marketplace of prebuilt actors.
Behind the Verdict
Where Olostep earns its place is the middle of a build: you're wiring web grounding into an agent or a RAG index, you want one key and one bill, and you don't want to chain four vendors for search, scrape, crawl, and answer. The endpoint set covers that path end to end, and the Python and Node clients share enough shape that moving between them isn't a rewrite. The cost math is the real argument. The $9 Starter tier at 5,000 requests and 150 concurrent is enough to prove a pipeline works before you commit. Standard at $99 for 200K requests lands near $0.399 per 1K, and if usage is spiky rather than steady, the six-month credit packs sidestep a subscription you won't fully burn. Persistent extraction changed how we'd design around it. Before the storage parameter landed in June 2026, a typical ingestion job paid twice for the same page: once to fetch, once again when the index needed the content later. Setting expires_in to 30d or 90d on /scrapes breaks that loop, and you can re-process stored results without touching the network. In practice, watch the concurrency ceiling rather than the headline request count. A large batch on Starter's 150 concurrent slots will queue, and the vendor's 100k-URLs-in-5-7-minutes number reflects its own bare-metal infrastructure, not what your plan gives you. Webhook events and monitors are the right tools for anything recurring or scheduled, so you aren't polling. We'd reach for Olostep when the team can read an API reference and wants scrape, crawl, map, search, answer, and monitor from one vendor at a low per-request price. We'd pass when the buyer needs a point-and-click interface with spreadsheet exports, or when legal has to clear a vendor security review before anyone writes code. Enterprises gated on compliance depth and
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Real-world workflow fit
Concrete scenarios for the personas Olostep actually fits — and what changes day-one when you adopt it.
You call /v1/searches with a natural-language query, get ranked results with snippets and source URLs, then pass the top URLs to /scrapes for Markdown and the question to /answers for a cited synthesis. You store the extractions with expires_in set to 90d so the same pages never have to be re-fetched during the evaluation cycle.
Outcome: A grounded, cited chatbot response assembled from live web pages, with the underlying corpus retained for debugging and re-querying rather than lost after the default ~7 days.
You set Monitors API watches on a list of competitor pricing and blog pages, then route change events through webhook events into your own store. For the first baseline snapshot you run a /crawls job with include_urls and exclude_urls filters and a max_pages cap, then retrieve each page's Markdown.
Outcome: You catch pricing edits and new posts as they happen instead of re-crawling on a fixed schedule, and the baseline pages stay queryable through the storage parameter.
You install the CLI with npm i -g olostep-cli and add the drop-in skills with olostep add skills, or point your MCP client at the hosted MCP server endpoint. Your coding agent then calls scrape, map, crawl, answer, and batch directly from the terminal with JSON output.
Outcome: Your coding agent has native web access without bespoke glue code, and you can pipe the same JSON into CI scripts.
Use Cases
- Monitor competitor websites for new blog posts or pricing updates via the Monitors API
- Extract structured data from hundreds of e-commerce pages for price comparison
- Feed web search results and AI-powered answers into a RAG chatbot with citations
- Automate brand protection by scraping mentions across multiple domains
- Crawl entire documentation sites to build a knowledge base for an AI assistant
- Batch process thousands of URLs to generate training data for ML models
- Persist scraped pages for 90+ days to build time-series datasets of market changes
- Build a custom research agent that searches, scrapes, and answers with citations
Limitations
- Olostep is a developer-facing web data API (scrape, crawl, map, search, answer, monitor) that requires API key/SDK integration.
- Free tier covers 500 successful requests; paid plans start at $9/mo with concurrency scaling by tier (Starter 150 concurrent, Standard 500).
- The storage retention parameter (10d, 30d, 60d, 90d, 180d, 365d, or never; default ~7 days) applies to /scrapes requests, and the changelog notes cold storage tiers and a SQL-like query interface are still in development.
as of 2026-10-09
Verification history
We have re-verified Olostep 21 times since . Each pass re-reads the vendor's own pages and re-checks every listed field against that evidence; passes where nothing had changed are marked as such.
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
- — re-verified summary, description, our verdict, our analysis, pricing model, pricing tiers, features, integrations, who it suits, who should skip it
Showing the 6 most recent of 21 verification passes.
Free to cite with attribution — this page re-verifies continuously.
12-month cost
Project the real annual outlay, including the implied monthly cost when only an annual tier is published.
Vendor list price only. Add-on usage, seat overages, and contract minimums are surfaced under Hidden costs & gotchas.
Plans compared
For each published Olostep tier: who it actually fits, and what it adds vs. the previous tier. Cross-reference the cost calculator above for projected annual outlay.
Trial
$0
Ideal for
A developer evaluating whether Olostep handles a specific tricky site before committing any budget — no credit card needed.
What this tier adds
Free entry point with 500 successful requests, JS rendering and residential IPs on every request, and low rate limits.
Starter
$9/mo
Ideal for
A solo developer or small team running a low-volume agent, RAG pipeline, or a handful of monitors on a modest budget.
What this tier adds
Adds 5,000 successful requests per month and 150 concurrent requests over the trial, at $1.800 per 1K effective.
Standard
$99/mo
Ideal for
A startup or data team with a real production pipeline pulling tens of thousands of pages a month who needs concurrency headroom.
What this tier adds
Raises the allowance to 200K requests and 500 concurrent requests, dropping the effective rate to $0.399 per 1K.
Scale
$399/mo
Ideal for
A scaleup running high-volume crawls and AI-powered browser automations where Starter and Standard concurrency is the bottleneck.
What this tier adds
Adds 1 million successful requests per month, the highest concurrency tier, and AI-powered Browser Automations.
Credit pack 10k
$20
Credit pack 250k
$200
Credit pack 2M
$1000
Enterprise
Custom
Ideal for
Large organisations needing hundreds of millions of credits, custom reliability commitments, and negotiated pricing through a sales conversation.
What this tier adds
Custom tier above Scale with enterprise-grade reliability and custom discounts; priced on contact with sales.
Where the pricing makes sense
The company stage and team size where Olostep's pricing actually pencils out — and where peers do it cheaper.
Olostep sits at the cheap end of the web-data API market. Starter at $9/mo with 5,000 requests and $1.800 per 1K undercuts most equivalents, and $99/mo Standard at 200K requests drops the effective rate to $0.399 per 1K — genuinely competitive at production scale. It is built for solo developers and small-to-mid teams; enterprises that need SOC 2 or on-prem deployment generally end up on pricier vendors with compliance packaging they can actually sign off on.
Setup time & first value
How long it actually takes to get something useful out of Olostep — broken out by persona, not the marketing-page minute.
For an individual developer, first value is roughly 10-15 minutes: create an API key, pip install olostep or npm i olostep, and run a /scrapes call — the free trial needs no credit card. For a team wiring Olostep into an agent, add an hour or two to install the MCP server or drop-in skills and confirm the tool calls behave. A production crawl pipeline with storage retention and webhooks is a day
Switching to or from Olostep
How to bring data in from common predecessors and how to get it back out — written for the switcher, not the buyer.
- →From Firecrawl: map /scrape calls to /scrapes with the same Markdown output, then add the storage parameter to avoid re-fetching pages your pipeline already processed.
- →From Apify actors: replace actor invocations with /scrapes, /crawls, and /maps calls, and route scheduled runs through the Monitors API instead of actor schedules.
- →From a hand-rolled Puppeteer/Playwright scraper: drop your proxy and JS-rendering layer and call /scrapes, which handles JavaScript rendering and residential IP rotation per request.
- →From separate search and scraping vendors: consolidate onto /v1/searches plus /scrapes under one API key and one bill.
- ↗To Firecrawl: export stored /scrapes Markdown and replay the URL list through Firecrawl's scrape and crawl endpoints.
- ↗To Apify: rebuild scheduled crawls as actors, accepting that you regain a marketplace of prebuilt scrapers but manage concurrency differently.
- ↗To a self-hosted scraper: keep the stored extractions you persisted with the storage parameter as your historical corpus and re-point new fetches at your own crawler.
Integrations
Resources & Guides
- Documentationolostep.com
Docs
Full product docs from olostep.com
- Resourceolostep.com
Blog - Best Web Search, Scraping, and Crawling API
A look into the Best Web Search, Scraping, and Crawling API for AI.
- Resourceolostep.com
Web Search, Scraping, Crawling & Structured Data API
Helpful link from olostep.com
- Resourceolostep.com
Web Data API Glossary
The complete reference for Web Search, Crawling, Scraping, and Extraction APIs.
Tutorials & Learning
YouTube returned 6 videos for “Olostep”, and we withheld 6: 6 could not be judged, because “Olostep” is a single word that other videos use for other things. We are showing none, because we could not prove any of them are about Olostep.
Official links
Tools that pair well with Olostep
Common stack mates teams adopt alongside Olostep, with the specific reason each pairing earns its keep.
Reprompt
Deep research AI agents that verify the live status and real ownership of physical businesses, returning cited answers instead of rows from a stale POI file.
AnyCrawler
AnyCrawler is a web scraping API that returns AI-ready Markdown for agents and RAG pipelines.
NewsCatcher
NewsCatcher is a recall-first news and web search API for AI agents and risk teams that can't afford a missed event.
Alternatives to Olostep
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Reprompt
Deep research AI agents that verify the live status and real ownership of physical businesses, returning cited answers instead of rows from a stale POI file.
AnyCrawler
AnyCrawler is a web scraping API that returns AI-ready Markdown for agents and RAG pipelines.
NewsCatcher
NewsCatcher is a recall-first news and web search API for AI agents and risk teams that can't afford a missed event.
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