Before You Write a Scraper, Check Firecrawl Alexandria

Last Thursday I published a 70-line scraper that watches the Arena leaderboard for new AI models. It runs daily and announces new arrivals.

Two days earlier, Firecrawl launched Alexandria, a catalog of providers that sell the structured version of exactly this kind of data, callable through the same scrape endpoint I was already paying for. I didn’t notice. I was busy having AI build me regex for a markdown table, while the company whose credits I was spending shipped the thing meant to make that regex unnecessary.

So to recap: I built a machine that watches the internet for new arrivals, and the first new arrival it missed was the one built to replace it.

If somebody is already selling the structured version of the data I wanted, why was I scraping the page? It never occurred to me to check.

What Alexandria Is

Alexandria is Firecrawl’s catalog of third-party data sources: FRED economic data, podcast transcripts, app store listings, company records, and a few hundred other things. They named their permanent store of the world’s data after history’s most famous case of data loss, which is either confidence or a gap in the marketing team’s classics minor. Each tool in it has a published contract that says what options it takes, what it…