Last updated: September 2026
What Context Actually Is
Context is a web data API built for software and AI agents that need live, structured access to the open web. Rather than assembling a scraper, a headless browser, a rotating proxy pool, and a set of separate enrichment vendors, a team points its code at one REST endpoint and receives clean content back. The product is positioned as the unified web context API, and that description holds up in practice: scraping, crawling, search, structured extraction, brand data, people and news lookups, and change monitoring all sit behind a single key.
This is developer infrastructure, not an app. There is no drag-and-drop workflow builder and no no-code canvas. You call endpoints, pass a JSON schema when you want typed output, and feed the results into your own pipeline. Context is backed by Y Combinator and carries SOC 2 Type I certification, which points at production use rather than one-off experiments.
Try Context Get started →One API From Raw Page to Structured Answer
The most distinctive thing about Context is how much of the journey from a raw URL to usable data happens in a single service. On the scraping side you can pull a page as Markdown or HTML, download raw resource bytes (up to 20 MiB per call), capture images, request a screenshot, or read a sitemap. Crawl Website walks an entire domain, and Web Search returns live results ten at a time. Each of these basic calls costs one credit, and JS rendering, anti-bot bypass, and premium proxies are included at that price rather than charged as separate multipliers.
The extraction endpoints are where the agent focus shows. Extract crawls a site and returns data shaped to a JSON schema you supply, so a product page or a directory becomes typed fields instead of a wall of text. Answers goes one step further, researching across the web and replying in the JSON shape you define, with a fast mode for lighter queries. Parse Bytes handles documents, adding a credit for each PDF page where OCR recovers text, so a linked report becomes searchable content in the same flow. Because the output already matches your schema, there is far less glue code between the API and a language model or a database.
Context is also built to be called by machines, not just people. It ships an MCP server so agents can use it as a tool, official SDKs for TypeScript, Python, Ruby, Go, and PHP, and an agentic authentication flow for automated clients. That combination makes it a natural fit inside an autonomous agent loop, where the model decides it needs a page or a fact and fetches it without a human in the middle.
What Else It Does
Brand and Company Intelligence
Retrieve Brand takes a domain, company name, email, stock ticker, or a single page URL and returns structured company data. Related endpoints cover Search Brand, Get Fonts, and Get Styleguide, so you can reconstruct a company's visual identity programmatically, and Search Brand is free on the Pro and Scale plans. Logo Link is a separate product that returns a square logo through a direct image URL and runs on its own quota, so it does not draw down your API credits.
People and News
Search News queries live and historical company news by name, domain, ticker, or ISIN, which is useful for monitoring and research feeds. Enrich People builds a profile from an email, a social profile URL, or a name paired with a company, and can return details such as education or location. Both slot neatly into sales tooling and market intelligence workflows.
Product and Entity Extraction
Extract Product and Extract Products pull commerce details from a page into structured records, which suits catalog building and price tracking. For classification, NAICS Lookup and SIC Lookup map a company to standard industry codes, and ID Transaction identifies transactions. These calls are priced higher than a plain scrape because they do more work per request.
Website Monitors
Page, Sitemap, and Extract monitors watch a target and flag changes over time, so an agent can react to a new pricing page or a fresh listing rather than re-crawling on a guess. The number of concurrent monitors and concurrent batch jobs you can run scales with your plan, from a couple on Free up to thousands on Scale.
Developer Experience and Reliability
Two policies stand out for anyone budgeting a scraping workload. First, failed or blocked requests are not billed, so you only pay for calls that return data. Second, the credit model is deliberately flat: one credit equals one scraped page, with stealth features baked in, while many competing APIs bill those same features as five to twenty-five times the base rate. Advanced calls do cost more (brand retrieval, styleguide generation, structured extraction, and industry classification are ten credits each, and Answers is one hundred credits, or ten in fast mode), but the accounting stays legible.
On the operations side, Enterprise plans include a 99.9% uptime SLA, and a public status page tracks incidents. Spend controls and usage alerts on the paid tiers help teams avoid a runaway bill, and brand data can be served from cache (with a default freshness window of roughly ninety days) to keep repeated lookups cheap. Together these choices make the cost of a large job predictable before you run it.
Pricing
Context runs on a freemium credit model with five tiers. The Free plan is $0 and includes 1,000 credits per month, 30 API calls per minute (10 if you sign up with a personal rather than a work email), and no overage, so it stops rather than surprises you. Developer is $25 per month with 10,000 credits and 60 calls per minute. Pro, the recommended tier, is $149 per month with 200,000 credits and 300 calls per minute, plus Slack support and spend controls. Scale is $499 per month with 1,000,000 credits and 700 calls per minute. Enterprise is custom priced and adds 2M+ credits, SSO and SAML, SCIM provisioning, volume discounts, and the uptime SLA.
Overage on paid plans is metered in 10,000-credit blocks (roughly $14 on Developer, $9 on Pro, and $7 on Scale), and annual billing saves two months versus paying monthly. Early-stage startups and nonprofits can apply for up to 30% off for a year. New users who sign up through the link on this page get 25% off for the first six months, which lowers the entry cost on the Developer and Pro tiers while you validate the product against your own volume.
Who It Is For
Context fits teams building AI agents, RAG pipelines, and LLM features that need current web data in a typed shape, along with dev-tool and sales-intelligence products that would otherwise license three or four separate vendors. Companies including Mintlify, daily.dev, SiteGPT, Sourcely, and Propane already build on it. It is less suited to non-technical users who want a point-and-click scraper, since everything here is API first and expects you to write code against it. If you are comfortable calling an endpoint and can start on the free tier before committing, the breadth of the surface and the flat credit accounting make it easy to reason about as usage grows.
Is there a free plan?
Yes. The Free tier costs $0 and includes 1,000 credits per month with no credit card required. It allows 30 API calls per minute on a work email (10 on a personal email) and has no overage, so usage simply pauses when you reach the limit.
How does credit pricing work?
One credit equals one scraped page, and JS rendering, anti-bot bypass, and premium proxies are all included at that price. Advanced calls cost more (brand retrieval, styleguide generation, structured extraction, and industry classification are ten credits, and Answers is one hundred credits or ten in fast mode). Failed or blocked requests are not billed.
Does Context work with AI agents and MCP?
Yes. It provides an MCP server so agents can call it as a tool, official SDKs for TypeScript, Python, Ruby, Go, and PHP, and an agentic authentication flow for automated clients. That makes it straightforward to drop into an autonomous agent loop.
Can I get a discount?
Several. Annual billing saves two months compared with paying monthly, early-stage startups and nonprofits can apply for up to 30% off for a year, and new users who sign up through the link on this page receive 25% off for the first six months.
Does it replace multiple data vendors?
That is the intent. Scraping, crawling, search, structured extraction, brand and company intelligence, people and news lookups, product extraction, and change monitoring all run through one API and one key, which removes the need to combine several specialized providers.
