SearXNG + Crawl4AI: Why We Stopped Renting APIs and Built Our Own

Description and use

Self‑hosting SearXNG and Crawl4AI removes vendor lock‑in, eliminates rate limits, and ensures DSGVO compliance, but incurs higher upfront engineering and infrastructure costs.

Problem

High and scaling costs, vendor lock‑in, rate limits, and DSGVO compliance issues with commercial search and crawl APIs.

Outcome

Self‑hosting eliminated vendor lock‑in and rate limits, ensured DSGVO compliance, but incurred higher upfront engineering and infrastructure costs; break‑even after ~6 months at current usage.

Workflow

• Deploy SearXNG and Crawl4AI via Docker Compose with Redis and Playwright backend
• Configure reverse proxy and internal hostnames
• Replace API nodes with HTTP request nodes pointing to internal services
• Map SearXNG JSON to downstream format
• Add fallback to manual review for Crawl4AI failures after 3 attempts
• Implement aggressive Redis caching and reduce upstream sources
• Set up cron job to restart Crawl4AI container every 6 hours
• Monitor latency, success rate, cache hit rate via internal dashboards

Evidence

In our first month, Crawl4AI successfully extracted content from 82% of target URLs on the first attempt. 14% required retries. 4% failed completely and entered manual review.

Source

The API bill was €400/month, so €1,200 for the same period. Short‑term, we paid more.

Source