# fastCRW (slim)

> fastCRW is a Firecrawl-compatible scraping engine in Rust from Nanofy OÜ in Estonia. It turns pages into Markdown or JSON and searches, maps and crawls sites, as an AGPL-3.0 self-hosted binary or a hosted API with an MCP server.

- Full: https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/crw.md (~7,950 tokens) · this version ~1,880 tokens · JSON https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/crw.json · canonical https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/crw
- Index: https://www.anchorterminal.com/llms.txt · API: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/index.json · MCP: https://www.anchorterminal.com/mcp · Updated: 2026-11-07 · pricing https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/crw#pricing · reviews https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/crw#reviews
- Licence: CC BY 4.0, credit Anchor Terminal and link this page (https://www.anchorterminal.com/terms/#data)

**B · 64.3/100 · rank #478 of 1486 · #11 in Web scraping & crawling · not agent-ready · confidence medium**


Assessment: Agents get 11 compact, annotated MCP tools with bounded output, a public OpenAPI spec, refunds on failed pages and a free self-hosted engine. The hosted service has no status history, publishes no SLA terms, names its operator only on the support page, and documents an MCP address with the API key in the URL path.

## Facts

- Kind: HTTP API · vendor: Nanofy OÜ · category: Web scraping & crawling · legal entity: Nanofy OÜ · provenance 67/100
- Endpoint: `https://fastcrw.com/mcp` (stdio, Streamable HTTP)
- Auth: OAuth or key · pricing: Freemium · x402: no · licence: AGPL-3.0
- Benchmark probes: not run yet, so Performance is pending
- Live, from our pollers (not part of the score): up at 2026-11-07 17:49 UTC · uptime 30 days 100.0% (195 probes) · p50 80 ms · p95 145 ms over 24 hours
- Vendor status page: not read, no machine-readable status found (2026-11-07 04:47 UTC)
- Surface listed: The hosted API at api.fastcrw.com and the hosted MCP server at fastcrw.com/mcp, with the open-source engine and stdio MCP server crw-mcp, read from the repository (cloned 6 November 2026), docs.fastcrw.com, fastcrw.com and the MCP registry. No account was made and no tool was called
- Name: The product is called fastCRW on its site and README. The binary, crates, npm and PyPI packages and the repository are named crw, so the slug stays crw. The repository moved from github.com/us/crw to github.com/fastcrw/crw
- Endpoints: /v1/search, /v1/scrape, /v1/map, /v1/crawl, /v1/batch/scrape, /v1/extract, /v1/change-tracking/diff and /v1/capabilities, plus Firecrawl v2-compatible routes under /firecrawl/v2. Account, balance and monitors live at fastcrw.com/api
- Concurrency: Free 3, Hobby 10, Standard 50, Growth 100, Scale 150 requests in flight. A request-rate guard sits above that, unpublished, with Retry-After and X-RateLimit headers. Self-hosted defaults to 10 requests a second
- Self-hosting: Single Rust binary, Docker image or install script for macOS and Linux. Renderers include plain HTTP, LightPanda, Chrome and an opt-in Camoufox tier; search and LLM extraction need the owner's own providers
- Telemetry: Data-source tools run from the local MCP server send fastCRW one usage count per call (provider, capability, outcome, time), never the URL, options or data. Off with `[client] telemetry = false` or CRW_CLIENT__TELEMETRY=false
- Data retention: The terms say crawled data is handled transiently unless caching is used, approved accounts can turn on zero data retention, and monitors keep page content for their retention period
- Legal entity: Nanofy OÜ, registry code 17365846, Tallinn, Estonia, named on fastcrw.com/support. The terms and privacy policy say only fastCRW
- Prices: Hobby plan $13 per month (plan); Standard plan $69 per month (plan); Hobby top-up $9 per 1,000 pages; Scale top-up $0.60 per 1,000 pages

- Scores: Reliability 50, Performance pending, Schema & documentation 91, Agent ergonomics 91, Security & auth 40, Payments & pricing 35, Task success pending, Maintenance & community 93, Transparency & trust 60 · total over the 7 assessed categories
- Why: Reliability, Graded on the hosted lines, for the hosted API and MCP server an agent would call; the self-hosted engine would read higher on the local lin… · Schema & documentation, OpenAPI 3.1 for 11 paths at version 0.41.0 in docs/openapi.json, checked against the server in CI, and typed JSON Schema inputs on every MCP… · Agent ergonomics, 11 compact MCP tools, two of them the data-source tools added in 0.41.0. Content is capped near 15,000 characters with `truncated: true` and… · Security & auth, The hosted MCP server publishes RFC 9728 metadata naming its own authorisation server, with PKCE S256, dynamic client registration and one s… · Payments & pricing, No x402, MPP or L402 (0). · Maintenance & community, v0.41.0 on 4 November 2026, matching the registry and npm (30). · Transparency & trust, The engine and MCP server are AGPL-3.0 and the SDKs MIT, while the hosted control plane is closed under terms that name no legal entity (25…
- Sources: 15, open questions: 6, both in the full twin
- Capabilities: web.scrape, web.crawl, web.extract, scraping.js-render, scraping.proxies, web.search, web.fetch
- JSON: https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/tools/crw.json
- Verify (for the vendor): the badge `https://www.anchorterminal.com/badges/crw.svg` or a link to https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/crw from a page on fastcrw.com or one of its subdomains, or the README at the root of github.com/fastcrw/crw, then `POST https://www.anchorterminal.com/api/v1/verify` `{"slug", "url"}` or `verify_listing` at /mcp; re-checked weekly, no effect on the grade. Snippets in the full twin.
- Support: Discord https://discord.gg/KNQBfFVc9J; hello@fastcrw.com; https://fastcrw.com/support; https://docs.fastcrw.com; more in the full twin

## Before you call it

1. Connect to https://fastcrw.com/mcp with OAuth rather than the /mcp/<API_KEY> address, so the key stays out of URLs and logs
2. Branch on `errorCode`. Stop on 402 insufficient_credits or llm_not_available, and on 429 wait for Retry-After before retrying
3. Check `success` as well as the HTTP status, since an anti-bot wall answers 200 with `success: false` and `errorCode: anti_bot`
4. Pass `startIndex` from a truncated result to read the rest of a long page instead of setting `maxLength: 0`
5. Use native /v1 routes for new work; /firecrawl/v2 is for Firecrawl SDK migrations and keeps the older 429 for empty balances

## Connect

```bash
npx -y crw-mcp@latest install
```

```bash
curl -X POST https://api.fastcrw.com/v1/scrape -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" -d '{"url":"https://example.com","formats":["markdown"]}'
```
Full config and headless snippets are in the full page. Through letme (picks today, calling later): https://letme.dev/crw

## Similar tools

| Tool | Grade | Score | Shared capabilities | Slim |
| --- | --- | --- | --- | --- |
| Spider | BB | 74.6 | web.scrape, web.extract, web.crawl, web.search, web.fetch, scraping.proxies, scraping.js-render | https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/spider-cloud.min.md |
| Scrapewise | C | 60 | web.scrape, web.extract, scraping.js-render, scraping.proxies, web.crawl, web.fetch, web.search | https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/scrapewise.min.md |
| Context.dev | BB | 75.7 | web.scrape, web.extract, web.crawl, scraping.js-render, scraping.proxies, web.search | https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/context-dev.min.md |
| Scrapfly | BB | 74.5 | web.scrape, web.fetch, web.extract, web.crawl, scraping.proxies, scraping.js-render | https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/scrapfly.min.md |
| Hyperbrowser | B | 67.7 | web.fetch, web.scrape, web.crawl, web.extract, web.search, scraping.proxies | https://www.anchorterminal.com/tools/hyperbrowser.min.md |


## Panel reviews (0, desk reviews from public material, no calls made)