Frankensurf

One read() call for AI agents, stitched from 28 web tools.
Cheapest tool first, every page checked, a receipt for every attempt.

Website · Docs · Quick start · Benchmark · Why I built it

Every web tool breaks somewhere, and they break on different sites. Frankensurf sits in front of all of them and gives your agent one call. It tries the cheapest tool first, checks the page is real, moves to a stronger tool only when a site pushes back, and returns clean page data with a receipt of how it got there.

Quick start

Python 3.12+, on Linux, macOS, or Windows through WSL. No account or key needed.

pip install "frankensurf[mcp]"
frankensurf install        # every free tool: browsers, stealth browsers, local search, Crawl4AI
frankensurf read "https://www.walmart.com/search?q=air+fryer" --explain

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

frankensurf install works like playwright install: name just the tools you want (frankensurf install search chromium), add --with-deps for the browsers' system libraries on Linux, --list to see what's installed where, and frankensurf uninstall all to remove it. No Docker needed. Each release is installed from PyPI on fresh Ubuntu and macOS machines and checked.

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 --recency week
frankensurf watch https://news.ycombinator.com/ --link-pattern 'item\?id=\d+'

In Claude Code as a plugin (the MCP server plus the skill that teaches Claude to use it):

/plugin marketplace add yail259/frankensurf
/plugin install frankensurf@frankensurf

From LangChain, the OpenAI Agents SDK or CrewAI (pip install "frankensurf[langchain]", and so on):

from frankensurf.agent_tools import langchain_tools   # or openai_agents_tools, crewai_tools
tools = langchain_tools()                              # frankensurf_read, frankensurf_search

You get raw page data, not answers: text or markdown, JSON-LD, the page's own JSON, images, and the receipt. Your agent decides what the page means. If it isn't what it wanted, it asks again with retry_of=<trace_id> and Frankensurf skips every tool it already tried.

Benchmark

scripts/toolbench.py runs each tool on its own, then Frankensurf, on the same pages with the same content checks. The newest set: 150 sites in 15 categories, picked before any was read, read once (11 October 2026, raw rows in benchmarks/2026-10-11/).

• Frankensurf read 17 sites Firecrawl missed; Firecrawl read none it missed.
• With no paid tools at all it is level with the best paid tool on its own (88.0% against 86.0% and 84.7%; at 150 sites that gap is within the noise).
• Its slowest reads are slower: the slowest tenth takes 25.7 s against Firecrawl's 10.6 s, when a read climbs several tools.
• Not a one-off: 95.3% vs 85.3% on the set the day before; 89.5% vs 80.3% and 88.5% vs 74.1% on earlier fresh sets.

Search

search uses free sources first and checks every result: on topic, the right kind of page, inside the date window. Exa, Brave, Tavily, Serper and other paid sources join only when you allow paid tools. Judged blind (results pooled and shuffled, which tool found them hidden), useful results in the top five:

Free, it beats Firecrawl's search: better on 35 queries, worse on 5. With paid allowed it is level with Exa. The local search engine (frankensurf install search, SearXNG without Docker) makes the free tier much stronger. v0.41 improved free search again: on a fresh blind set of 120 queries it beat v0.40 on 41 and lost on 12 (3.42 against 2.71 useful results of 5, benchmarks/2026-10-14-search-v041/). Details in benchmarks/2026-10-13-search/.

What else is in the box

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 APIs, 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.

Known walls

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

• Need the paid tools: in a free-only spot check, 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; 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

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

The product design is in SPEC.rst and contributor rules in AGENTS.md. New tools are plugins, never branches in Core: see Writing a plugin and the example in examples/frankensurf-plugin-example. The website and docs live in site/.

Licence

Apache-2.0. See LICENSE.