The pitch: prepend markdown.new/ to any URL, get clean Markdown back. One line. Works anywhere you'd otherwise write a scraper.
I built the first version of markdown.new about a year ago. The problem was obvious: AI pipelines were choking on raw HTML, and every team building RAG systems was writing the same boilerplate — Puppeteer for rendering, BeautifulSoup for stripping, custom regex for cleanup, separate handlers for PDFs. I wanted a single URL prepend to collapse all of that.
It worked, people used it, but it didn't exactly take the internet by storm.
Then on February 12, 2026, Cloudflare announced Markdown for Agents — a native feature that lets AI agents request Markdown directly from any Cloudflare-enabled site using a simple Accept: text/markdown header. The network converts HTML to Markdown at the edge, on the fly, and returns it with token count estimates in the response headers. No extra tooling needed on the client side.
It was exactly the infrastructure-level solution the problem deserved. I immediately integrated it as the primary tier in markdown.new's conversion pipeline. Two days later I shipped the updated version. By end of day the announcement tweet had nearly a million views.
Sometimes you build the right thing a year too early. Then the ecosystem catches up, and suddenly it all clicks.
elbeyoglu•1h ago
I built the first version of markdown.new about a year ago. The problem was obvious: AI pipelines were choking on raw HTML, and every team building RAG systems was writing the same boilerplate — Puppeteer for rendering, BeautifulSoup for stripping, custom regex for cleanup, separate handlers for PDFs. I wanted a single URL prepend to collapse all of that. It worked, people used it, but it didn't exactly take the internet by storm.
Then on February 12, 2026, Cloudflare announced Markdown for Agents — a native feature that lets AI agents request Markdown directly from any Cloudflare-enabled site using a simple Accept: text/markdown header. The network converts HTML to Markdown at the edge, on the fly, and returns it with token count estimates in the response headers. No extra tooling needed on the client side.
It was exactly the infrastructure-level solution the problem deserved. I immediately integrated it as the primary tier in markdown.new's conversion pipeline. Two days later I shipped the updated version. By end of day the announcement tweet had nearly a million views.
Sometimes you build the right thing a year too early. Then the ecosystem catches up, and suddenly it all clicks.