firecrawl parse

Turn a local document into clean markdown on disk. Supports PDF, DOCX, DOC, ODT, RTF, XLSX, XLS, HTML/HTM.

Quick start

Always save to .firecrawl/ with -o — parsed docs can be hundreds of KB and blow up context if streamed to stdout. Add .firecrawl/ to .gitignore.

mkdir -p .firecrawl

# File → markdown
firecrawl parse ./paper.pdf -o .firecrawl/paper.md

# AI summary
firecrawl parse ./paper.pdf -S -o .firecrawl/paper-summary.md

# Ask a question about the doc
firecrawl parse ./paper.pdf -Q "What are the main conclusions?" \
  -o .firecrawl/paper-qa.md

Then read the output incrementally with head, grep, or rg.

Run firecrawl parse --help for the full option list.

Done when: the markdown, summary, or answer is written under .firecrawl/ and you have inspected it with bounded reads.

Tips

• Quote paths with spaces: firecrawl parse "./My Doc.pdf" -o .firecrawl/mydoc.md.
• Max upload size: 50 MB per file.
• Credits: ~1 per PDF page; HTML is 1 flat.
• Check .firecrawl/ before re-parsing the same file.
• To check your credit balance (recommended for batch processing and similar workflows), use firecrawl credit-usage (requires authentication).

See also

• firecrawl-scrape — same idea for URLs
• firecrawl-build-scrape — building document extraction into an app instead of running it here