A language model pays for every token of nav, ads, and footer it reads.
That one sentence is the whole reason tearsheet exists. I do a lot of research work inside Claude Code, and a huge chunk of it is "go read this page and tell me what it says." Firecrawl-style tools are genuinely great at that — but they're SaaS. API keys, quotas, a bill, and your URLs leaving your machine to get there. I wanted the same toolset, running entirely on my own laptop, feeding my agent clean content without any of that.
So I built it. It's called tearsheet, it's MIT-licensed, and this is the story of why.
tearsheet (n.): a page torn from a publication and filed as proof it ran.
That definition is on the repo for a reason. The whole tool is built around the idea that what it hands back should be trustworthy enough to file as evidence. More on that below — it's the part I care about most.
