[Self-Host] [License] Can firecrawl be self-hosted for as an internal microservice?

[ssmirr]

Considering the AGPL license, can firecrawl be freely self-hosted as an internal (i.e. not user-facing) crawler/scraper microservice for a commercial SaaS product?

A related question was asked in #525, however it was not clear to me whether that answer was specific to personal use, or it would also apply to a commercial product that may use self-hosted firecrawl as a microservice dependency.

[kbumsik]

To me, the license seems to be very similar to the early version of MongoDB Licensing (before SSPL), which has two parts:

• Firecrawl engine (server): AGPL
• SDKs (python and etc): MIT

So I think their intention is, that if your SaaS code only rely on the SDK, you are not subjected to AGPL. But if you have some custom code on the engine itself you need to open source the custom code.

This is just my speculation though. We would like to hear opinions from the maintainers...

[Liberot2]

Same idea, and it's currently in progress of building internal Web microservices' LLMs.txt. The tool provided by https://github.com/firecrawl/create-llmstxt-py is not working properly, but the curl command can successfully scrape the data.

[Chadha93]

@kbumsik @ssmirr In addition to this answer - For licensing questions, please reach out directly to the team at help@firecrawl.com