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When do you need to pay for Screaming Frog, and how many licenses will you need?
Summary
You need a paid license once a site is bigger than 500 URLs, or once you want to save crawls and change settings. Each license costs $279 a year (or £199) and covers one person, however many computers that person uses and however many sites they crawl. Buying five or more at once brings the price down, to $235 each at 20 licenses.
What the free version won't do
The free SEO Spider stops each crawl at 500 URLs. It also won't save a crawl, and most of the configuration is locked. A license lifts the cap and opens up saved crawls, custom source code search, custom extraction, Google Analytics and Search Console integration, and JavaScript rendering. Licensed users also get technical support.
There's no limit on how many websites one license can crawl. For sites past 500 URLs, the site audit tools guide sets Screaming Frog against cloud crawlers with monthly limits.
One license per person
Screaming Frog is strict about this. Each license key belongs to one named person for its whole term. That person can install it on several devices within reasonable use, as long as nobody else can use them, and the licensing system blocks keys that are being used by more than one person. A team of five needs five licenses. If someone leaves the company, the rest of their term can be moved to a colleague, once a year.
Bulk pricing starts at five licenses:
- 1 to 4 licenses: $279 each (£199)
- 5 to 9: $265 (£189)
- 10 to 19: $249 (£179)
- 20 or more: $235 (£169)
Four people pay $1,116 a year. Five pay $1,325, only $209 more for the extra person.
The base price is set in pounds. Dollar and euro prices were adjusted in May 2025 to $279 and €245. New licenses and renewals cost the same, and after a price increase renewals move to the new price. Screaming Frog doesn't run coupons or Black Friday deals.
Your computer sets the real crawl limit
The paid version's crawl limit is listed as unlimited, with a note that the real ceiling depends on the memory and storage you give it. The user guide asks for at least a 64-bit system with 4 GB of RAM free. It says 8 GB is generally enough for crawls under 200,000 URLs, and for more than a million it recommends an SSD and 16 GB or more. In database storage mode, where crawl data is written to disk, 4 GB of allocated memory covers crawls of up to two million URLs.
Renewal, expiry and refunds
Licenses run for a year. When one expires, the software drops back to the free version: the 500-URL cap returns, the configuration locks, and crawls you saved earlier won't open. Licenses don't renew automatically unless you chose auto-renew when you bought, and you can't switch it on later. Buying a new license before the old one runs out doesn't extend the old one.
You can get a full refund within 14 days of purchase. There are no prorated refunds for time you didn't use.
Work out your own number: the SEO Tools Cost Calculator finds the cheapest published plan for your sites, tracked keywords and users.
Sources
Figures come from each vendor's own pricing pages and documentation. We have not tested these tools hands-on, and no ranking here is paid for.