Why not use a plain old html → markdown converter? You can easily strip out ads using CSS /jQuery-like selectors. That would cost zero dollars.

Looks like they are including Trafilatura in the comparison tables, which I've used before with pretty decent results, but it still has trouble with some pages. Looks like the pulpie f1 scores are quite a bit better, especially for the hard cases.

Would be curious how it runs on more modest hardware though, I'm using it for a small bookmark archiving tool and being able to run it on my small mini-pc homelab would be nice.

We see far better performance with models. Heuristics break on richer content like codeblocks, formulae, quotes, etc. In our testing, our model was 25 F1 points better than Trafilatura.

If I had to reckon, it's because the web comes in very many shapes, and outsourcing that work to a generalist LLM/SLM like GPT Nano is expensive, and doing it deterministically will never catch all the edge cases as well as a purpose-built encoder when run at webscale.