Draco: Open-source Rust web scraper offers self-hostable Firecrawl alternative

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A developer has released Draco, a single-binary web scraper written in Rust, designed as a self-hostable alternative to paid services like Firecrawl. The tool uses a three-tier escalation engine — starting with a stealth TLS fingerprint mimicking a real browser, then an in-process V8 isolate for JavaScript-heavy pages, and finally falling back to a real browser if needed. Draco outputs clean Markdown or structured JSON suited for LLM pipelines, and includes a Firecrawl-compatible REST API, a built-in Model Context Protocol server, and parallel web search. In benchmarks across eight sites including Cloudflare-protected and heavy SPA targets, Draco passed all eight tests while Playwright passed only four and consumed over twice the RAM. The project is open source under MIT/Apache-2.0 licenses and is described as a work in progress, with some potential breakages on uncommon sites.

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