I have been using lynx to integrate a chatbot with web content. Here's the Python function that converts a website to plain text:

  def website_to_text(url):
       output = subprocess.check_output(["lynx", "-dump", "-nolist", url], stderr=subprocess.PIPE, universal_newlines=True)
       return output.strip()

While a hosted service can be convenient, I find that using a text-based browser like Lynx gives almost the same results and consistent results.