What is Maxun?
Maxun turns websites into structured data. You build a robot either by recording what you do in a browser (Recorder Mode) or by describing the fields in plain language (AI Mode), then run it on a schedule or through its API, SDK, CLI or MCP server and get CSV or JSON back. It also converts whole pages to Markdown or HTML, crawls sites, runs web searches and watches pages for changes.
The self-hosted edition runs under Docker Compose as five services: Postgres, MinIO object storage, a backend on port 8080, a frontend and a browser service. AI Mode uses the model you configure: Anthropic, OpenAI or any OpenAI-compatible server, or Ollama on your own machine. Maxun Cloud at app.maxun.dev adds anti-bot handling, CAPTCHA solving, proxy rotation and Deep Extraction.
The repository was started in October 2023, is licensed AGPLv3 and tagged v0.1.0 on 25 October 2026.
How much does Maxun cost?
| Plan | Price | What you get |
|---|---|---|
| Starter | $19/month | 5,000 credits a month, 1 user, 5 browsers at once |
| Growth | $99/month | 100,000 credits a month, 5 users, 20 browsers at once |
| Premium | Custom | Custom limits and retention, SLA, account manager |
Free to self-host under AGPLv3. Maxun Cloud: 7-day trial without a card (5 pages or 50 rows, 2 robots); Starter $19/month for 5,000 credits; Growth $99/month for 100,000 credits; Premium priced on request. Subscriptions are not refunded.
Is Maxun worth it?
Maxun's best idea is that the expensive step happens once. In AI Mode, according to the docs, the model is called only when the robot is created, not on every run; after that the robot replays fixed steps. A recorded robot never calls a model at all. That makes a daily job cheaper than agent-style scrapers that send every page to an LLM, and more predictable while the page layout holds.
The project is large and busy: 18,402 stars, 1,587 forks and merged pull requests as recently as 7 November 2026. By its own numbering it is still pre-1.0, with v0.1.0 tagged on 25 October 2026 after 48 releases in the 0.0 series. The self-hosted stack is five containers, which is more to keep alive than a pip install of Crawl4AI or Scrapling.
Cloud billing is in credits. A page scraped or crawled costs 1 credit; Extract returns 10 rows per credit, the Agent 4 rows per credit and search 5 results per credit. Starter's 5,000 credits at $19 a month is about 5,000 pages; Growth's 100,000 credits at $99 is where a team running monitors will land. Failed requests are free, unused credits expire each cycle and subscription fees are not refunded.
The catch: the features that decide whether you get data from a defended site, CAPTCHA bypass, rotating proxies and the stronger stealth tier, are Cloud features, and the README opens with seven sponsor blocks, six of them proxy sellers with discount codes. Self-hosters should expect to buy proxies and fight blocks themselves. AI Mode reads one page only and cannot log in or click through steps; that needs Recorder Mode. Scraping behind a login or against a site's terms is your legal exposure, not Maxun's.
Our take: for an operations analyst who needs the same table from the same ten sites every morning, Maxun is closer to a finished product than Firecrawl or Crawl4AI, which assume a developer. For one-off research or heavily defended targets, those libraries or a paid scraping API do the job with less ceremony.
Where it earns its place
A pricing analyst at a 20-person online retailer
Pull competitor prices from eight shops every morning
Record one robot per shop, schedule it daily and send results to a webhook or CSV. Eight shops of 200 product pages is about 1,600 credits a run, so daily runs need Growth at $99 a month rather than Starter.
A data engineer building a retrieval index from public documentation
Turn a documentation site into Markdown for an embedding pipeline
Self-host with Docker Compose, run a Crawl robot over the site and pull Markdown through the API. Without a Cloud plan there is no credit bill, only your server and bandwidth.
A local news desk tracking council planning notices
Be told when the planning page changes
Point a Monitoring robot at the notices page. Monitoring costs extra credits on top of each run, so a handful of pages checked daily fits inside Starter's 5,000 credits.
Before you commit
- Setup
- Sign up at app.maxun.dev for the 7-day trial, or clone the repository and start the Docker Compose stack; the docs also cover a setup without Docker.
- Integrations
- REST API, Node SDK, CLI and an MCP server for agents; webhooks and scheduled runs; CSV and JSON export. AI Mode takes Anthropic, OpenAI or OpenAI-compatible endpoints, or Ollama.
- Data and privacy
- Self-hosted runs keep data on your servers, apart from page content sent to the model you configure for AI Mode. Cloud retention is listed as a custom term on Premium; retention for other plans is not published on the pricing page.
- Cost at scale
- Growth at $99 a month covers about 100,000 page scrapes or 1,000,000 extracted rows; beyond that Premium is priced on request. Self-hosters pay for servers and, for defended sites, proxies.
- Limits
- Starter allows 15 requests a minute for Crawl, Extract and Agent and 100 for Scrape and Search; Growth allows 90 and 300. AI Mode reads a single page and stops with an explanation if it finds nothing.
What’s good
- Recorded robots run without any model calls
- AI Mode calls the LLM only when the robot is built
- API, SDK, CLI, MCP server and webhooks on every plan
- Self-hosted AI Mode works with Ollama for fully local runs
- Failed requests cost no credits
What’s not
- Anti-bot handling, CAPTCHA solving and proxy rotation are Cloud features
- Self-hosting means running five containers, Postgres and MinIO included
- Still pre-1.0 by its own version numbers
- No refunds, and unused credits expire every cycle
Best for
Operations and research teams that need recurring tables from the same websites and would rather record clicks than write scraping code.
Maxun alternatives
Maxun: common questions
- Is Maxun worth it?
- Maxun is the scraper to hand a non-programmer, because a recorded robot keeps running without an LLM bill, though the anti-bot muscle hard sites need lives in the paid cloud. We rate it 4.0 out of 5.
- How much does Maxun cost?
- Free to self-host under AGPLv3. Maxun Cloud: 7-day trial without a card (5 pages or 50 rows, 2 robots); Starter $19/month for 5,000 credits; Growth $99/month for 100,000 credits; Premium priced on request. Subscriptions are not refunded.
- What are the downsides of Maxun?
- Anti-bot handling, CAPTCHA solving and proxy rotation are Cloud features; self-hosting means running five containers, Postgres and MinIO included; still pre-1.0 by its own version numbers; no refunds, and unused credits expire every cycle.
- Who is Maxun best for?
- Operations and research teams that need recurring tables from the same websites and would rather record clicks than write scraping code.
- How much does Maxun cost for a team or in production?
- Growth at $99 a month covers about 100,000 page scrapes or 1,000,000 extracted rows; beyond that Premium is priced on request. Self-hosters pay for servers and, for defended sites, proxies.
- Is Maxun safe for company data?
- Self-hosted runs keep data on your servers, apart from page content sent to the model you configure for AI Mode. Cloud retention is listed as a custom term on Premium; retention for other plans is not published on the pricing page.
- What are the best Maxun alternatives?
- The closest alternatives we have reviewed are Firecrawl, Crawl4AI and Scrapling.
Answers checked Nov 14, 2026.
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