The upstream firecrawl repo contains the following blurb:

>This repository is in development, and we're still integrating custom modules into the mono repo. It's not fully ready for self-hosted deployment yet, but you can run it locally.

Firecrawl's API surface and general functionality were ideal for our Trieve sitesearch product, but we needed a version ready for self-hosting that was easy to contribute to and scale on Kubernetes. Therefore, we decided to fork and begin maintaining a stripped down, stable version.

Fire-engine, Firecrawl's solution for anti-bot pages, being closed source is the biggest deal breaker requiring us to maintain this fork. Further, our purposes not requiring the SaaS and AI dependencies also pushes our use-case far enough away from Firecrawl's current mission that it doesn't seem like merging into the upstream is viable at this time.