Gems on cloud_affects

Firecrawl — Web scraping API for AI

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Firecrawl turns websites into clean data for AI. You give it a URL, it gives you markdown.

The annoying part of scraping isn’t fetching HTML — it’s the JavaScript rendering, the anti-bot blocks, the rotating proxies, and then still getting back a wall of navigation and ads with the thing you wanted buried inside. Firecrawl takes care of that pipeline. /scrape returns a page as markdown or JSON. /crawl walks a whole site without needing a sitemap. /search queries the web and returns full page content. There’s also an agent mode that can click, type, and scroll before extracting, which is useful for anything behind a login or a UI interaction.

Tavily — Search API Built for AI Agents

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Tavily is a search API for AI agents. Not a thin wrapper around Google — it’s built from the ground up for LLM workflows.

The problem it solves is simple: language models have a knowledge cutoff, and raw web results are a mess of HTML, ads, and noise. Tavily fetches and filters that before returning it, so the model gets clean excerpts it can actually use. /search is the main endpoint. /extract pulls structured content from a specific URL. /crawl goes deeper. There’s also /research for multi-step tasks, which recently topped some benchmarks.

ToS;DR — Terms of Service, Rated

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

You click “I agree” without reading. Everyone does. ToS;DR reads it for you.

It grades services from A to E based on what the terms actually say. Behind each grade are specific reviewed clauses — “your data may be sold to third parties,” “you can delete your account at any time” — not vague summaries. Search any major service, no account needed.

There’s a browser extension too. Shows the grade as you browse, passively. Open source, no ads.

TrustScan — Privacy Tools, Client-Side

Tue, 07 Apr 2026 00:00:00 +0000

TrustScan is eight privacy tools that run entirely in your browser. No servers, no accounts, nothing sent anywhere.

The useful ones: strip metadata from PDFs, opt out of AI training across 30+ platforms at once, audit a browser extension before you install it, see how unique your browser looks to trackers. There’s also a privacy policy simplifier and a compliance checker if you need to know which laws apply to your business.