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.

bash

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

Option	Description
`-S, --summary`	AI-generated summary
`-Q, --query <prompt>`	Ask a question about the parsed content
`-o, --output <path>`	Output file path — always use this
`-f, --format <fmt>`	`markdown` (default), `html`, `summary`
`--timeout <ms>`	Timeout for the parse job
`--timing`	Show request duration

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.

firecrawl parse

When to use

Quick start

Options

Tips

See also