Spider

A Rust-based web crawling and scraping API with JS rendering

By Nathan KesslerUpdated Jul 27, 2026

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What is Spider?

Spider is a web crawling and scraping platform with a hosted REST API: /scrape, /crawl, /screenshot, /links, and /search endpoints. The core engine is written in Rust, MIT-licensed, open source, and self-hostable. The hosted service adds a real browser for JavaScript rendering and returns clean markdown or structured JSON. It integrates natively with LangChain, LlamaIndex, CrewAI, FlowiseAI, AutoGen, and Agno, and lists Dify.AI as a customer.

Our verdict

Pay-as-you-go pricing at roughly $0.03 per 1,000 pages and a self-hostable open-source core make it a low-commitment option for teams that want markdown or JSON output ready for LLM pipelines. The advertised 99.9% success rate and 10K requests/minute throughput are self-reported, with no independent benchmark cited.

Categories:

Crawling Frameworks

Crawling frameworks give engineering teams full control over their pipeline: where it runs, how it scales, and what it collects. The trade is that anti-bot work and infrastructure become your problem rather than a vendor's, which is why they pair well with a proxy network.

Tags:#freemium #open-source #self-hosted #js-rendering #structured-output #markdown-output #screenshots #crawling #api-first #framework-integrations #llm-ready

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How Spider compares

Scrapy

Scrapy is a widely used open-source Python crawling framework, a solid pick for teams that would rather run their own framework than pay for a hosted API.

Crawlee

Crawlee is an open-source crawling library for Node.js and Python with built-in browser handling, comparable to Spider's self-hosted Rust engine.

Crawl4AI

Crawl4AI is an open-source crawler built for LLM-ready markdown output, aimed at the same use case as Spider's hosted markdown and JSON responses.