Maptrail vs Screaming Frog pricing: $750 vs $19 once

OneTimeSuite Blog · Published 2026-07-21

Screaming Frog charges £199 a year, forever, for a crawler most people use to do one thing: audit a site and ship a sitemap. Maptrail does exactly that on your own machine — point it at a URL, crawl locally, and get a standards-compliant sitemap.xml, a human-readable HTML sitemap and a full CSV SEO report. $19, once. Your sitemap is not a subscription.

This is the full pricing breakdown: what Screaming Frog actually costs over one, two and three years, what Maptrail gives you for $19 paid once, and the honest cases where the subscription is still the right call.

What Screaming Frog actually costs you

At £199/yr (~$250/yr), one Screaming Frog subscription adds up to $250 every year — $750 over a three-year window, for software you stop owning the day you cancel. Maptrail is $19 the day you buy it, and the meter never runs again.

Three years in, the gap is $731 — and every year after that adds another $250 to the subscription side of the ledger.

Maptrail vs Screaming Frog, feature by feature

Price is only half the story — here's how the two line up on the things that decide day-to-day use:

What you get for $19, once

Local website crawler and sitemap generator — XML, HTML and a full CSV SEO report, offline. The highlights:

• 🕷️ Local breadth-first crawler — Enter a URL and crawl the whole site from your machine with a live progress table — status, depth, title, meta length, H1, word count.
• 🎛️ Depth, limit & pattern controls — Set max depth and page limit, plus include/exclude URL patterns (substrings or /regex/) to skip tag and sort pages.
• 📄 Standards-compliant sitemap.xml — lastmod pulled from real Last-Modified headers, priority scaled by crawl depth.
• 🗂️ Automatic 50k index chunking — Sites over 50,000 URLs split into numbered sitemaps plus a sitemap-index.xml, exactly per the sitemaps.org spec.

Pays for itself in under a month of a Screaming Frog license — and every year after is pure savings.

Switching is 3 steps

1. Buy once on Whop. One payment of $19 gets you the signed Windows installer, or clone the MIT source and build it yourself for free.
2. Point it at a URL. Enter your site, set depth and limits, hit crawl — everything runs locally on your machine.
3. Export your sitemap. Save sitemap.xml, the HTML sitemap and the CSV SEO report wherever you like, then ship them.

When paying Screaming Frog is still the right call

Being straight about it: the subscription earns its keep in three situations. If your team is large enough that Screaming Frog's collaboration features, permissions and admin controls are genuinely load-bearing; if your workflow is built on its integrations and leaving means rebuilding that plumbing; or if you have enterprise requirements — SSO, audit logs, SLAs, a vendor to call — that a pay-once app doesn't come with. Everyone else is paying £199/yr (~$250/yr) for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.

If that's you, Maptrail is $19, once. For the deeper dive, read the Maptrail vs Screaming Frog head-to-head.

Frequently asked questions

Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — Maptrail is MIT-licensed at github.com/bensblueprints/sitemap-generator-mvp. The $19 buys the signed Windows installer, 1-click setup and updates; building from source is free.

Does it do everything Screaming Frog does?
No, and we'd rather say so. Screaming Frog also does log-file analysis, JS rendering and integrations. If you need all that, buy it. If you need clean sitemaps and a crawl report, Maptrail does that for $19 once.

Does my crawl data get uploaded?
Never. Maptrail makes network requests only to the site you tell it to crawl — no telemetry, no update pings, no account. History lives in a local SQLite file.

What platforms does it run on?
The packaged installer is for Windows. The MIT source runs anywhere Electron does if you build it yourself.

More on Screaming Frog pricing

Maptrail — product page, demo & full feature list · All OneTimeSuite pricing breakdowns