Open Scouts

Open Scouts is an open-source project from Firecrawl for creating AI "scouts": automated tasks that run on a schedule, search the web, and notify you by email when they find what you asked for. It is built on Next.js and Supabase and uses the Firecrawl SDK for search and scraping and OpenAI for the agent and embeddings. A hosted app is available at openscouts.firecrawl.dev, and the code can be self-hosted.

What It Is

Open Scouts is a web monitoring platform. You describe what you want to track, for example new restaurants nearby or AI news, and the system configures search queries and strategies for you. The homepage shows a chat-style assistant that guides scout setup. Scouts then run in the background and surface discoveries on a scout page.

How a Scout Works

A scout is created from a plain-language query, and the user signs in with email/password or Google OAuth. The user picks a run frequency (hourly, every 3 days, or weekly). A pg_cron dispatcher checks every minute for due scouts and triggers each one in its own isolated Supabase Edge Function invocation. The OpenAI-based agent uses search and scrape tools through Firecrawl. Each successful run produces a one-sentence AI summary with a vector embedding, and results appear in real time. A Run Now button triggers a scout immediately, and email alerts are sent through Resend when results are found.

Self-Hosting and Setup

Setup involves cloning the repo, creating a Supabase project, enabling the pg_cron, pg_net, vector and supabase_vault extensions, filling in a .env file, and running the database setup script. You then deploy the scout-cron and send-test-email edge functions. Users can add their own Firecrawl API key in Settings, or a shared server-side key can be configured. Row Level Security keeps each user's scouts and executions isolated. The README notes a Partner Key feature that is in closed beta for enterprise customers only.