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.

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.