In simple English
This tool turns web pages into clean markdown files or structured data. It searches the web, crawls entire websites and extracts specific facts. You can run it on your own server or pay for a managed cloud service. It is designed to be fast and use very little memory. It also connects to coding assistants so your AI can read live web pages.
What it is
fastCRW is a web scraping, crawling and search engine written in Rust. It provides a command-line interface, a REST API and a Model Context Protocol (an open standard that lets AI assistants talk to local data sources and tools) server.
What it is good for
Solo builders who need to feed clean web data into language models or applications without paying high cloud fees. It removes the need to write custom HTML parsers for every new website.
- Uses very little memory, running on about 6 MB of RAM.
- Drop-in replacement for existing scraping services with compatible API routes.
- Includes direct support for connecting to AI coding tools out of the box.
- Licensed under AGPL-3.0, which has strict copyleft rules for network services.
- Requires compiling from source or downloading prebuilt binaries if you self-host.
- Advanced JavaScript-heavy sites may still need external rendering proxies.
Writing custom web scrapers with BeautifulSoup or Puppeteer.
Claude Code or Cursor for AI-assisted web research.
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curl -fsSL https://fastcrw.com/install | sh