Myth: "Screaming Frog free covers small sites fine"

Myth: "Screaming Frog free covers small sites fine"

Commonly repeated, and half-wrong. I crawled a 600-URL site on the free version and the £259/yr paid one.

Free (500 URL cap):
➕ Full crawl engine, genuinely powerful
➖ Caps at 500 URLs, your 600-page site is silently truncated
➖ No scheduling, no JS rendering, no Search Console / GA hookup

Paid:
➕ Unlimited URLs + JS rendering + API connections
➖ Yearly cost, overkill for a tiny brochure site

Best for: sites genuinely under 500 URLs including images and redirects (you hit 500 faster than you think), free is great. Anything JS-heavy or needing GSC overlay, you need paid.

Price-vs-value: the 500 cap counts all resource URLs, not just pages, so 'small site' fills up quick. That's the trap in the myth.

Affiliate-neutral, no links.

Pick free for static sub-500 sites. Skip it if you render anything in JavaScript.