Screaming frog pricing and plans guide for the UK (2025)

If you're running SEO in the UK, Screaming Frog SEO Spider is one of the most cost-effective ways to crawl websites, surface technical issues, and ship fixes fast. In this guide, we take a look at Screaming Frog pricing and plans for 2025, so that your finance and marketing teams can budget with confidence.

And, if you're paying for SaaS tools in foreign currencies, you can use the Wise Business multi-currency card to save on conversion fees and pay your subscriptions at the mid-market rate.

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Screaming Frog pricing overview

Screaming Frog offers two versions: a Free Version and a Paid Licence. The Free Version lets you crawl up to 500 URLs but locks advanced features. The paid licence removes the URL limit and enables all the advanced crawling, integrations, visualisations, and scheduling.

Pricing is per user, billed annually, with volume discounts if you buy 5+ licences together. As of May 2025, the list price is £199 per year¹.

Plan	Price (GBP, Annual per licence)
Free Version	£0
1–4 licences	£199
5–9 licences	£189 each
10–19 licences	£179 each
20+ licences	£169 each

It's important to note that the licences are issued per user (not per device). Screaming Frog explicitly allows a single user to activate their licence on more than one machine, but blocks keys shared between multiple users².

Free plan pricing

The Free Version costs £0¹. It is intentionally capped at 500 URLs per crawl, making it ideal for quick spot checks, small brochure sites, and proof-of-concept audits before you commit to a licence.

Free plan features

Despite being free, you can still perform core technical checks (think broken links, redirects, titles and meta data, and XML sitemaps) on Windows, macOS, or Linux desktops at no cost¹. If you later upgrade, the same interface simply unlocks more options, so there's no new tool to learn.

Is the Free plan right for my business?

Choose Free if you manage very small sites (sub-500 pages), want to validate a handful of templates, or need a no-cost sanity check ahead of a larger investment. It also works well as a training environment for junior team members who are learning how crawlers surface issues.

Paid licence pricing

The paid licence is £199 per user, per year when buying 1–4 seats¹, with volume discounts as low as £169 for 20+ licences purchased together. For UK procurement, the clean, single-price annual model simplifies approvals versus high-variance monthly usage tools.

If you are subscribing in a different currency such as USD, you can check the Wise Currency Converter before paying to see the live exchange rate and forecast your spending more accurately.

Paid licence features

This is where Screaming Frog becomes a full-fat technical auditing workhorse. The URL cap is removed, and you can enable JavaScript rendering via the integrated Chromium engine to crawl modern, JS-heavy frameworks like React, Vue, and Angular.

You can schedule crawls (one-off or recurring), connect APIs for GA4, Google Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights, and merge user/performance data directly into your crawl. The licence also unlocks custom extraction³ (XPath, CSS Path, regex) for grabbing structured or bespoke data at scale, plus visualisations and automated reporting workflows.

Is the Paid licence right for my business?

Opt for Paid if you're an agency, marketplace, publisher, or multi-site retailer, or if your sites are JavaScript-rich and you need scheduled, repeatable audits that combine crawl data with traffic, queries, and Core Web Vitals.

Teams that standardise on the paid licence typically build faster QA loops, run "pre-deployment" crawls on staging, and monitor regressions with scheduled comparisons.

What is the pricing currency?

Screaming Frog lists official SEO Spider prices in GBP⁴, USD, and EUR per seat, per year. On the licence page, you can toggle between currencies at checkout, making it straightforward for finance teams to choose the one that best fits their accounting system.

If your budget is in pounds but you're forced to pay in euros or dollars, it's worth noting that you can face hidden costs that quickly add up, due to foreign transaction fees and exchange rate markups.

To avoid this, you can use a Wise Business multi-currency card. With this card, you can hold GBP, EUR, USD and 40+ currencies in your Wise Business account and spend directly, avoiding unnecessary conversion fees.

Wise uses the mid-market rate, which can immensely help your business save every time you pay for a SaaS subscription in a different currency.

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How to save on your Screaming Frog bill next month

Keeping your SEO tools cost-effective isn't just about picking the cheapest option, but about matching features to your business needs. Screaming Frog can be extremely affordable when used wisely, but costs creep in if your team pays for licences that aren't fully utilised.

By taking a closer look at your current plan, crawl habits, and payment methods, you can spot quick wins to bring down your subscription bill. Here are some practical steps UK businesses can apply right away:

• Start with the right tier – If your sites are small, or you audit infrequently, the Free edition might be enough. Upgrade when you outgrow the 500-URL cap, need JS rendering, API data, custom extraction, crawl comparisons, or scheduling to automate recurring QA.
• Audit actual usage, not assumed usage – Seat creep is real. Quarterly, review who's using advanced features: do they really run scheduled crawls every week, or was it a one-off project? Are they consistently using PageSpeed Insights/GA4/GSC integrations during crawls, or exporting CSVs and doing analysis elsewhere? Dormant users can revert to Free until they need Paid again.
• Right-size your configuration – If your goal is to validate a set of templates or fixed URL lists, switch to List Mode to reduce noise and machine time. When you do need large crawls, follow Screaming Frog's guidance: Database Storage Mode + SSD + 4GB RAM allocation is the sweet spot for multi-million-URL crawls without impacting your daily workstation⁵.
• Automate reporting, not just crawling – If you report weekly or monthly, use the built-in scheduling and the Looker Studio workflow to auto-refresh charts against crawl datasets so your team isn't burning hours on exports. Pair this with custom extraction to pull the exact attributes stakeholders care about.
• Avoid FX markups – If you're billed in USD or EUR, foreign transaction fees can quietly add 2–4%. The Wise Business multi-currency card lets you pay in over 40+ currencies using the mid-market rate with low transparent fees*, local account details, and proper invoice trails, which is ideal for SaaS bought across teams in different currencies.

Get Wise Business for Smart Savings

Ready to slash SaaS spending? Use the Wise Business multi‑currency card to pay for Screaming Frog and other tools at the mid‑market exchange rate with zero hidden fees*. You'll simplify reconciliation with multi-currency balances, reduce FX padding, and keep budgets predictable, especially if different teams buy tools in different currencies.

If you regularly buy tools in USD/EUR but budget in GBP, Wise Business is a great choice, enabling you to save on currency conversions and simplify your global billing, all while making smart budgeting moves for your UK business.

Screaming Frog vs. Sitebulb – price comparison

Both tools are proven desktop crawlers, but their commercial models feel different in practice. Screaming Frog is a desktop licence at a fixed annual price: £199 per user with volume breaks as low as £169 and no separate feature add-ons for the Spider.

It's predictable, and there's no vendor-hosted cloud service to pay for (you can still "run in the cloud" by installing the desktop Spider on your own VM if you need to). Sitebulb, by contrast, sells Desktop and a separate Cloud product.

On Desktop, Lite is positioned for smaller audits (roughly 10,000 URLs per audit), while Pro is designed for substantial technical work (Sitebulb quotes up to 500,000 URLs per audit on a typical workstation, with options to push higher if your hardware can take it). If you want a hosted, team-friendly crawler with unlimited projects, Sitebulb Cloud starts from about £95 per month⁶ and scales based on users and monthly URL allowances, which is attractive for distributed teams that want browser-based access without leaning on local machines.

In short, if you want a low, predictable annual desktop cost and deep technical flexibility, Screaming Frog is hard to beat. On the other hand, if your priority is collaboration, remote access, and cloud-scale crawling priced on a monthly basis, Sitebulb Cloud is the closer fit.

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FAQs

Here are some of the most common questions:

Does Screaming Frog have a free plan or free trial?

Yes. The Free Version lets you crawl up to 500 URLs. You can download the desktop app for Windows/macOS/Linux.

Is there a mobile app?

No. Screaming Frog SEO Spider is a desktop application.

Does Screaming Frog have an API?

Screaming Frog doesn't expose the Spider itself via a public API, but the paid licence integrates with APIs like GA4, Google Search Console, and PageSpeed Insights to enrich crawl data.

How many URLs can I crawl on the paid licence?

Licensed versions can handle very large crawls and expose a configurable cap up to ~5 million URLs (hardware permitting).

Are there implementation or onboarding fees?

No, there are no separate onboarding charges. You download, licence, and run. Training and tutorials are public if you want to skill up.

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Choose the right Screaming Frog subscription and pay with Wise

Screaming Frog SEO Spider offers UK businesses a powerful, cost-effective technical SEO tool. The Free Version is perfect for smaller projects, while the Paid Licence unlocks advanced features for serious crawling needs, starting at £199 per licence per year, with volume discounts available.

For businesses paying in foreign currencies, using the Wise Business multi-currency card is a smart way to avoid extra charges and keep your SaaS spend efficient.

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Sources used in this article:

1. Pricing – Screaming Frog
2. SEO Spider FAQ – Screaming Frog
3. SEO Spider Configuration – Screaming Frog
4. SEO Spider FAQ – Screaming Frog
5. SEO Spider General – Screaming Frog
6. Desktop plans for SEO professionals – Sitebulb

Sources last checked: 10th September 2025