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Show HN: Pulpie – Models for Cleaning the Web

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Show HN: Pulpie – Models for Cleaning the Web

#1
Hey HN, I'm Shreyash, founder of Feyn. We built Pulpie, a family of Pareto optimal models for cleaning the web. Pulpie strips boilerplate (ads, footers, sidebars) from raw HTML and returns just the main content as HTML or Markdown.

We match SOTA extraction quality while being 20x cheaper. Cleaning 1 billion webpages costs $7,900 with Pulpie versus $159,000 with Dripper, the current leading extractor.

The gains come from architecture. Today's leading extractors are decoders that generate output one token at a time. Each step reads the full model from memory to produce a single token. Conversely, Pulpie models are encoders. They run one forward pass over the full input HTML and label each block as boilerplate or content. As a result, Pulpie is compute-bound while decoders are memory-bound. Cheaper GPUs have relatively more compute than memory bandwidth. This makes Pulpie easy to run optimally.

Here's Pulpie and Dripper cleaning the same pages side by side: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ibd-tIiQECo. You can try a side-by-side comparison yourself: https://huggingface.co/spaces/feyninc/pulpie

Our motivation for Pulpie came from building a deep research harness. Every search API returns noisy content that contains ads, nav elements, and sidebars. In one instance, an ad for "Gemini on Pixel" slipped into our search results, got passed into LLM context, and ended up in the final answer served to the user. Pretty embarrassing moment for us but it helped us realize how bad data kills model intelligence. We built Pulpie to get clean data for cheap.

All models are open source on Hugging Face. You can read about our training process and how to use Pulpie here: https://usefeyn.com/blog/pulpie-pareto-optimal-models-for-cl...

Happy to answer any questions!

Show HN: Pulpie – Models for Cleaning the Web
usefeyn.com

Re: Show HN: Pulpie – Models for Cleaning the Web

#8
post #6

Why does the 'Quality vs Cost of Web Content Extraction' chart not have zero cost at the origin? Up to the right does not have to mean better; we can read.

Funnily enough, that wasn't my first choice either. I A/B tested it with a small group and people understood "up and to the right is better" faster.

Re: Show HN: Pulpie – Models for Cleaning the Web

#9

[flagged]

Thanks! Good questions:

We haven't run a targeted eval against SEO spam yet. However, with Pulpie, each block gets labeled by what the text actually says rather than what the tags look like. Wrapping boilerplate in semantic tags fools rule based extractors precisely because they judge structure. Pulpie doesn't. The closest benchmark we have for this is the WebMainBench difficulty split, where pulpie-orange-small holds 0.813 on the hard subset. For comparison, trafilatura scores a 0.526.

For quantization, we haven't benchmarked INT8 or FP8. Everything in the post ran on L4 and A100. That said, I expect it to go well for a few reasons. It's a single forward pass over the page, so the workload is compute bound rather than bandwidth bound, which is why the L4 held up so well against the A100 and why cheaper cards should degrade gracefully. At 210M params the small model is roughly 420MB in FP16 and half that in INT8. So it fits on any consumer GPU with room to spare. Also, one pass classification tends to survive 8 bit quantization better than autoregressive generation since there is no error accumulation across decode steps.

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