The price anchor
| Maptrail | Screaming Frog | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $0 — no subscription | £199/yr (~$250/yr) |
| Annual | $0 after purchase | $250 |
| 5-year total | $19 | $1,250 |
| 10-year total | $19 | $2,500 |
Subscription figures from the vendor's published pricing (£199/yr (~$250/yr), ~$250/yr); the Maptrail column is the full price, paid once.
Break-even analysis
Pays for itself in under a month of a Screaming Frog license — and every year after is pure savings.
- After 1 year: Maptrail has cost you $19 total — Screaming Frog has cost $250.
- After 3 years: Maptrail is still $19 — the subscription is at $750.
- After 5 years: Maptrail is still $19 — the subscription is at $1,250.
What you get for $19 once
- 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.
- Full CSV SEO report. Every crawled page with status, title, meta, H1, word count, canonical and noindex — including the 404s the sitemap correctly leaves out, so you can fix them.
- No renewal, ever. The license does not expire and there is no per-seat meter — $19 is the whole price.
Pricing 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.
Maptrail — $19, one time
Or get Maptrail plus every other app in the suite: the OneTimeSuite bundle is currently $97, one time.