Try it

Python 3.12 or newer, on Linux or Windows through WSL (macOS should work but isn’t tested yet):

pip install "frankensurf[mcp]"
frankensurf setup        # Chromium + the free stealth browsers, a few minutes
frankensurf read "https://www.walmart.com/search?q=air+fryer" --explain

No account or key needed. The read climbs until it gets the real page:

https://www.walmart.com/search?q=air+fryer
  ✗ http                   CAPTCHA                0.4s
  ✗ local                  CAPTCHA                1.5s
  ✓ camoufox               got the page           15.6s

air fryer - Walmart.com
24,192 characters via camoufox, complete (107 results), free

Drop --explain for the full JSON: text or markdown, JSON-LD, the page’s embedded and fetched JSON, images, and the receipt.

Free or paid

Everything works with no keys. Paid tools are opt-in, and only come in once a site has walled a free tool, cheapest likely success first. From the newest benchmark below (150 sites picked before any was read, v0.33):

To allow paid tools, set their keys (for example FIRECRAWL_API_KEY) and pass --paid (--max-cost USD caps a read; from Python, allow_paid_fallbacks and max_cost_usd). See Paid tools and budgets.

Use it

From an agent, as an MCP server (setup for each client):

claude mcp add frankensurf -- frankensurf-mcp

From Python:

from frankensurf import Runtime

async with Runtime("state") as web:
    page = await web.read("https://example.com", policy_overrides={"prefer_markdown": True})
    hits = await web.search("playwright python tutorial")

From the command line:

frankensurf read https://example.com --markdown
frankensurf search playwright python tutorial
frankensurf watch https://news.ycombinator.com/ --link-pattern 'item\?id=\d+'

What you get back is raw page data, not answers. Your agent decides what the page means, and if it isn’t what it wanted, it can ask again with retry_of=<trace_id> to skip every tool already tried.

Also in the box: profiles (log in once, reuse the session from any tool), human handoff for CAPTCHAs and 2FA, site modules (save what your agent learns about a site as data), and Web Bot Auth request signing.

Want the article, not the menus? Pass --main (MCP main_content=True) for main_text (best with pip install "frankensurf[main]").

Search takes --site, --exclude-domain, --recency and --region on every source, a --vertical (news, reference, discussions, qa, code, papers, books) backed by official free APIs, and --mode merge to fuse every source at once. Running on a server that reads URLs it didn’t choose? Set FRANKENSURF_BLOCK_PRIVATE_NETWORK=1.

Every page read carries receipt.quality: good, partial or poor, with flags such as paywall, menus or placeholder, so an agent (or a paid fallback) knows when a page didn’t really come through.

Slow page? A read with no page after 3 seconds starts two more free tools beside it and keeps the first complete page (--lightning races from the start). A URL that answers not found is looked up with the site’s own search, and receipt.rescued says so. Still walled? Allow a real Chrome on your machine (--real-browser, with its own profile, never yours) or a second connection (FRANKENSURF_EGRESS; frankensurf egress check shows where each comes out).

Keeping up with many sites? frankensurf watch-sites URL… --since DATE lists their new pages from the feeds and sitemaps they publish, polled with conditional requests. Running on a server? Run Steel beside it (docker compose up -d) and, if sites still refuse your data-centre address, set FRANKENSURF_PROXY to a proxy you bring.

Agents learn the tools from a bundled skill: the MCP server sends it as its instructions, and frankensurf skill install adds it to ~/.claude/skills.

Reading many pages from one site? Let Frankensurf learn it first:

frankensurf module discover https://www.example.com/ --query "desk lamp" --save

That finds the site’s search (its schema.org SearchAction, its search form, or by typing once into its search box), reads the results, and saves a site module: where the items live in the page’s own data, plus a search template. From then on every search on that site comes back as structured items, and batch_template runs many searches as one polite batch. Check the sample rows before saving; the draft can pick the wrong list.

How it works

Every way to fetch a page is a rung: plain HTTP and markdown negotiation, browsers, stealth browsers and signed requests, hosted browsers, paid unblockers, and finally a person clearing the wall in a visible browser. A read starts at the cheapest rung and climbs only when a page pushes back. Every tool is a plugin, so new ones slot in as another rung. See How escalation works and the full list of integrations.

Benchmark

scripts/toolbench.py runs each tool on its own, then Frankensurf, on the same pages with the same content checks. The newest: 150 sites in 15 categories picked before any was read (held-out set 6), read on 10 October 2026 with v0.33, raw rows in benchmarks/2026-10-10/:

Frankensurf with paid fallbacks read 18 sites Firecrawl missed; Firecrawl read none it missed. Of the 146 sites any tool read, it got 97.9%. Its median read is faster than Firecrawl’s, but its slowest reads are slower: p90 25.9 s against 11.3 s, when a read climbs several tools. Medians are over pages read; cost is per 1,000 pages read right. ZenRows is left out (its plan ran out of credits), as is Scrapfly.

Re-run with v0.34 the next morning: 95.3% again with paid fallbacks (median 3.0 s), free tools 84.0% with a median of 4.4 s. The free median depends on Jina Reader’s cache: the first run came an hour after other runs had read the same pages through it, and its first read of a page takes about 6 s.

Earlier fresh sets, same method: 152 sites on 6 October (v0.16) 89.5% against Firecrawl’s 80.3%; 139 sites on 9 October (v0.26) 88.5% against 74.1%. See Benchmarks.

Known walls

It’s an alpha, and some sites still win:

• Need the paid tools: in a free-only spot check on 9 October, Etsy, Home Depot, Yelp, Crunchbase and G2 blocked every free tool.

• Beat everything so far: Shopee, Temu and Idealista.

• Social sites without a login: LinkedIn, X, YouTube, Threads, Bluesky and Reddit read fine. Instagram, TikTok, Facebook and Pinterest show only the public shell (name, bio, counts); the posts need a login.

• Logged-in pages (your feeds, your orders) need a profile.

• A slow tail: most reads take a few seconds, but one in ten climbs several tools and takes 25 s or more.

Found a site it can’t read? Report it; every report becomes a test case.

Develop

From a clone:

python3 -m venv .venv
.venv/bin/pip install -e '.[test,mcp]'
.venv/bin/frankensurf setup
PYTHONPATH=.:src .venv/bin/pytest -q

The product design is in SPEC.rst; contributor rules are in AGENTS.md. New tools are plugins, never branches in Core; see Writing a plugin for building, installing and trusting your own (frankensurf plugins), with a working example in examples/frankensurf-plugin-example. The website and docs live in site/.

Licence

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE.