News for hackers. Stuff that matters.

I replaced Firecrawl with 2,700 lines of Elixir

Posted by pipboyguy on Monday March 30, 2026 @03:30PM
from the self-post dept.
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.

( 4 comments | 3 points | on HN )
Re:I replaced Firecrawl with 2,700 lines of Elixir by mosaibah on Monday March 30, 2026 @04:00PM (#47579042)
The 80% point is real, but the missing 20% is where Firecrawl actually earns its money rotating proxies, browser fingerprint evasion, handling sites that detect headless Chrome. If your crawling targets are mostly cooperative sites, 2700 lines of Elixir is the right call. If you ever hit Cloudflare-heavy targets at scale, that 20% becomes the whole problem.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I replaced Firecrawl with 2,700 lines of Elixir by pipboyguy on Tuesday March 31, 2026 @03:21AM (#47583849)
Indeed. Though rotating proxies I got from lightpanda hosted. That actually gets me more than you'd think
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I replaced Firecrawl with 2,700 lines of Elixir by alexspring on Wednesday April 01, 2026 @01:51AM (#47597283)
lightpanda is the most detectable thing ever. A custom built browser with fingerprints any serious antibot instantly blocks.
[ Parent | on HN ]
Re:I replaced Firecrawl with 2,700 lines of Elixir by deesha_tech on Wednesday April 01, 2026 @05:31PM (#47606805)
The real cost was probably the cognitive load of integrating someone else's abstractions. Elixir's concurrency model likely made the custom approach feel simpler in the end, not just cheaper.
[ Parent | on HN ]