marcon680

Generally our use cases are completely different -- if a user is doing scraping, it's been structured scraping on a small (<50) set of sites where they need to be able to pull data from a website as if it was an API call, not as a way to web-crawl and get masses of training data.

We gate full access to the platform partially for this reason. We debated giving fewer than 50 free browser sessions, for example, and have already banned a few accounts from our self-serve today that were unidentifiable/"company accounts" without a legitimate web presence.

We have paying customers in production at the Growth and Enterprise plans :)

Yep we actually cache flows after first run! This makes flows that are closer to traditional RPA pretty much the same as using Playwright/Puppeteer.

From my understanding, Browserbase mostly provides remote browsers for their users. We also provide remote browsers, but with a lot more infrastructure on top (single/multi web agents, caching/reliability support, an agentic IDE/editor, etc).

Will fix, thanks for flagging!

Good questions! Will add these and put a data processors page tonight. We use Anthropic/OpenAI models.

Could I ask why the flow starts with a human logging in? Is it because you're using their credentials and/or have some sensitivity around storing their credentials? Or is it something to do with 2FA (we handle 2FA)? Or are you just storing the session data after they log in so you can re-use it for those few months you mentioned?

Re: Puppeteer automation as part of the script -- we have a feature we wrote for one of our customers that we didn't promote to production where you can define a deterministic action in the dashboard that allows you to paste in JavaScript, but we're likely not to push that to prod anytime soon. Could you explain your reasoning for wanting to use Puppeteer still? We've generally seen customers fully switch over to Simplex instead of relying on their original Puppeteer/Playwright scripts -- since we have action caching, the underlying script (click on div locator with this div id, etc.) is pretty similar to what you'd get using Playwright.

Yes, it's a huge pain from what we've seen. That portal is actually running in production for some of our AR/AP AI customers, and getting browser agents to properly parse that page was difficult -- Coupa injects all the DOM elements through a JavaScript <script/> tag like 2-5 seconds after the page loads, non-deterministically. :)

Currently no, it's just the three options (free vs. $2500/month vs. larger enterprise plans). We do usually offer 2-3 month ramp up periods for the $2500/month plans that are usage based.

To be transparent, we're an early startup, and a big part of that is user validation. We've been lucky to have companies as small as 5 people sign onto our $2500/month plan -- it shows some commitment on their side and helps us understand whether it's a real problem for our users. That's the same reason the $2500/month plan isn't self serve (you have to talk to us first).

We're definitely thinking of adding a pay as you go plan! But we aren't there yet re: our understanding of the market, if that makes sense.

Some of the things we're trying to differently are 1) making flows deterministic by using vision models that have a consistent output given an image and an input query and 2) breaking up flows into these smaller atomic actions in order to improve consistency as well.

RE: workflows w/ complex forms and tabs -- do you have some sites that are good examples of this? We'd love to see how Simplex does.

Thanks John! We should make that more clear in the docs. You can set browser=None on initialization and Simplex will create a local browser instance that can run on your local websites. We're not planning to be open source right now since a large portion of our product is custom vision models + inference speedups through hosting.

Browser Use is another YC company. Probably the biggest difference is that they're more agent focused while we're more lower level -- in the Claude Computer Use camp like you mentioned.