Show HN: Draco – A single-binary, self-hostable Firecrawl alternative in Rust

Hacker News featured Draco, a self-hosted Rust web scraper designed as an alternative to expensive APIs like Firecrawl. Instead of spinning up headless Chrome instances that drain RAM, it uses a tiered approach: first trying a stealth-fetch with custom TLS fingerprinting to bypass anti-bot walls, then escalating to an in-process V8 engine for JavaScript-heavy sites, and falling back to a real browser only as needed. According to the creator's benchmarks, Draco handled challenging sites while using a fraction of Playwright's memory footprint. The tool runs as a daemon with a Firecrawl-compatible REST API, natively exposes a Model Context Protocol server for AI agents, and includes built-in web search—all open source under MIT and Apache licenses. The project is still work-in-progress.

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