Firecrawl vs a homegrown Playwright scraper
a homegrown Playwright scraper charges your own engineering hours, forever. Firecrawl is open source and self-hosted.
The short answer
The honest comparison is not against a vendor, it is against the week per quarter you spend fixing selectors. Firecrawl turns pages into clean markdown including JavaScript-rendered ones.
Pick Firecrawl when
- You already maintain a scraper and resent it.
- You need content an LLM can read, not raw HTML.
- Your targets render client-side and your scraper does not.
Stay with a homegrown Playwright scraper when
- You scrape exactly one stable site and it has never broken.
- AGPL is a problem for how you ship — their hosted option sidesteps the question.
The migration cost nobody mentions
Low: it is an API-shaped swap. Read the licence first if you plan to self-host inside a product you sell.
We deliberately do not quote a homegrown Playwright scraper's prices — third-party pricing changes without notice and a stale number is worse than none. The pricing model is what determines whether self-hosting wins, and that is stated above. Check current pricing with the vendor.