We're happy to announce that usage-based accounts on browserless are now live! Similar to our dedicated accounts, usage-based accounts come with all the API's that you now expect from the browserless service with the convenience of only paying for what you use. You can now sign-up on our main website here..
If you've been fighting to get Chrome running stable in all the serverless places, this product was built specifically for you! All of Chromes dependencies are there, including missing fonts and other packages, plus we pre-boot Chrome for you ensuring that your start times are near zero. We even support running in "headful" mode as well! Here's a chart of some workloads we've seen with this new pricing structure:
Type of sessionTotal TimeCostCapture a full-site screenshot with /screenshot2 seconds running$0.00016Generate a 5-page PDF with /pdf5 seconds running$0.0004Scrape 10 pages in parallel30 seconds running (each)$0.024Run a unit-test with 10 specs in parallel5 seconds (each)$0.0004Complex sign-up test of your web-app25 minutes$0.12Complex interaction with 10 pages in parallel25 minutes (each)$1.20
Usage-based accounts are prepaid, meaning when you sign-up you purchase time on the service in advance. As you run sessions, we periodically subtract your used seconds from your pre-paid time. When your credit goes below $5, and again at $1, we'll send you an email notice letting you know that your pre-paid time is running low. Once exhausted your sessions will stop running.
How do they work?
As opposed to dedicated accounts, usage-based accounts run on a fleet of Large workers that we mantain, and use all the same sandboxing and security procedures we deploy on our dedicated instances. Since usage-based accounts run on shared infrastructure, session times may fluctuate by a few seconds. Given the network-reliance on many headless-browser workloads, this generally happens regardless.
How much is it?
Usage based accounts are charged at a rate of $0.00008/second, with no extra costs for networking or request count. If a session lasts 800 milliseconds, we charge for 1 second. There's no other fees or charges related to using the service.
What's the minimum pre-payment?
You can open an account for as little as $10. When signing up we convert the money you use to seconds, so in the case of $10 you get 125,000 seconds (or roughly 35 hours) of service time. This amount only goes down as you interact with the service, there are no other fees and your pre-paid time doesn't decay.
What APIs are available?
All of them except the /workspace APIs, which we hope to add soon. This means you can run all your selenium, webdriver, capybara, puppeteer work through browserless and only pay for what you're using. All of our other REST API's work as well.
Is there a way I can try the service before buying?
Yup, we have a free demo instance running 24/7 that allows you to make a few requests a minute without signing up at all. Simply use any of our API's and omit the authorization tokens, and you'll be automatically routed to our demo instance. Please be aware that at times of high traffic it can be slower to respond, but is generally resilient.
Is there anything I need to install?
Aside from your libraries to interact with the service (puppeteer-core, selenium, or any others) -- not at all. Once you have your token you can start using the service just like you'd use locally. The account page also includes a dashboard of how many sessions you've ran, time on the service, and more.
If you have any further questions, please feel free to get in touch!