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CRW Docs

Turn websites into usable data with one API. Start with a single scrape request, then move into search, map, crawl, extract, or MCP only when your workflow actually needs them.

Fastest first win: one URL, one markdown response
Works for: agents, ETL, RAG, structured extraction
Deploy: cloud first, self-host when ready
Make your first request Self-host CRW
30-second example
The shortest path to a successful response
If this request works, you already understand the core CRW model: known URL in, clean content out. Everything else in the docs builds on that.
curl -X POST https://fastcrw.com/api/v1/scrape \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "url": "https://example.com",
    "formats": ["markdown"]
  }'

{
  "success": true,
  "data": {
    "markdown": "# Example Domain\n\nThis domain is for use in illustrative examples...",
    "metadata": {
      "title": "Example Domain",
      "sourceURL": "https://example.com",
      "statusCode": 200,
      "elapsedMs": 32
    }
  }
}

Start here

:::cards ::card{icon="code" title="Scrape a page" href="#scraping" description="Use one URL and get markdown, HTML, links, or JSON back."} ::card{icon="search" title="Search the web" href="#search" description="Find URLs first, then scrape only the results you care about."} ::card{icon="plug" title="Add MCP tools" href="#mcp" description="Give Claude, Cursor, Codex, and other hosts live web access."} :::

Choose your path

:::cards ::card{icon="rocket" title="Cloud API" href="#quick-start" description="The fastest first run: get a key, copy one request, and move."} ::card{icon="plug" title="MCP" href="#mcp" description="Best when your agent runtime already expects MCP tools."} ::card{icon="box" title="Self-host" href="#self-hosting" description="Best when you want your own infrastructure, auth, and deployment controls."} :::

Why teams switch to CRW

CRW is meant to feel easy on day one without closing off the more serious use cases:

  • one API surface for single-page scrape, discovery, bounded crawl, and extraction,
  • Firecrawl-compatible request shapes where they matter,
  • low-ops self-hosting when you need infra control,
  • and a built-in MCP server for agent workflows.

Benchmarks

Tested against Firecrawl scrape-content-dataset-v1 on 1,000 real-world URLs:

Metric CRW Firecrawl Crawl4AI
Coverage (1K URLs) 92.0% 77.2% —
Avg Latency 833ms 4,600ms —
Idle RAM 6.6 MB ~500 MB+ —
Cold start 85 ms 30–60 s —
Dependencies single binary Node + Redis + PG + RabbitMQ Python + Playwright

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