firecrawl parse

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

When to use

• You have a file on disk (not a URL) and want its text as markdown
• User drops a PDF/DOCX and asks what it says, or to summarize it
• Use scrape instead when the source is a URL

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 head, grep, rg etc., or incrementally read the file - don't load the whole thing at once.

Options

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 the firecrawl credit-usage command.

See also

• firecrawl-scrape — same idea for URLs