Screaming Frog's Free Version Stops at 500 URLs — That Is the Entire Decision

Almost every other question about this tool is downstream of one number.

Screaming Frog publishes a free version with a 500 URL crawl limit, and a paid version at £199 per year where the crawl limit is listed as unlimited — with the vendor's own asterisk attached: dependent on allocated memory and storage.

So before comparing features, count the URLs on the site you actually need to audit. Not pages — URLs, which includes every image, script, stylesheet and paginated variant the crawler will touch.

A five-page brochure site fits in 500. A blog with two years of posts, tag archives and images does not. Most people discover which side of the line they are on about ninety seconds into their first crawl, when the progress bar stops.

This deserves saying plainly, because it is unusual and it is the most useful thing about the pricing.

The free version has no expiry, no card required and no countdown. It is a permanently free tool that does the same crawling as the paid one, up to 500 URLs. That is not a demo — for a small site it is the finished product, and you may never need to pay.

If your site is genuinely small, the correct amount to spend here is nothing, and you should be suspicious of any review that walks you past that fact on the way to a purchase link.

Here is the sentence from the pricing page that costs agencies money:

Licences are per user. 2 users will require 2 individual licences.

So the annual cost is not £199. It is £199 multiplied by the number of people who need to run a crawl.

Bulk pricing does soften this, and the tiers are published rather than hidden behind a sales call:

The discount is real but modest — 20 or more licences saves £30 each, about 15%. This is not volume pricing designed to make large deployments cheap; it is a small acknowledgement that you bought a lot.

The pricing page states that licences last one year, after which renewal is required.

That matters because the tool is often described — including in the older version of this very review — as a fair one-time annual payment, which quietly implies you own something. You do not. Stop paying and it stops crawling, the same as any SaaS.

The difference from cloud SEO suites is not permanence. It is that the software and the crawl data sit on your own machine, which is a genuine distinction, just not a financial one.

The asterisk is the honest part of the pricing page, and it is worth reading rather than skipping.

Unlimited crawling is bounded by allocated memory and storage — meaning a large crawl is constrained by the laptop you run it on. On a machine with modest RAM, a several-hundred-thousand-URL crawl in memory mode will struggle, and the fix is switching to database storage mode and having disk space to spare.

So "unlimited" means "we do not impose a cap", not "any site will crawl comfortably." For most sites the distinction never comes up. For enterprise-scale audits it is the whole ballgame, and it is a hardware budget question rather than a licence one.

If you want to know what to publish next, this is the wrong category of tool entirely. It is a technical crawler — it finds broken links, redirect chains, duplicate titles and orphaned pages. It has no keyword research, no rank tracking and no content scoring, and buying it hoping for those is a common and expensive mistake.

If nobody on the team reads a crawl report, the licence will lapse unused. This tool produces a large quantity of technical findings and assumes someone knows which ones matter. Without that person, you have bought a very thorough list of things nobody will fix.

The free version is the recommendation for most small sites, and it is not a compromise. Run it, hit the 500-URL wall or don't, and let that answer the question for you.

If you clear the wall, £199 a year is straightforward pricing in a category full of metered credits — but budget it per person, not per company, and treat it as an annual subscription that stops working when you stop paying.

The free version's 500-URL limit, the £199 annual price, the per-user licence rule, the 5/10/20-licence bulk tiers, the one-year licence term and the memory-and-storage caveat on unlimited crawling are all from Screaming Frog's own pricing page, checked 10 August 2026.