I replaced Firecrawl with 2,700 lines of Elixir

[pipboyguy]

I was paying about $190/month for Firecrawl. It worked, but it was expensive and felt half baked. The CLI was awkward to use. Maybe I wasn't using it right, but the whole thing felt like it was in flux. I figured if they vibe coded it I might as well do it myself.

So I vibed my own. 3k lines of Elixir, custom readability engine, no external services. It even manages, for some sites at least, to evade bot protection.

It saves a lot of cash and helps pay the Claude Code Max subscription.

I guess my realization is that you shouldn't just take tooling aimed at AI agents for granted. Code is a commodity now, so a price tag for an MCP tool nearly as much as the most expensive subscription tiers for Claude Code/Codex makes no sense to me.

Just ask your agent to code 80% of the tool for yourself.