Browserless vs Browserbase Pricing Compared

Browserless and Browserbase get shortlisted together because both rent you a Chromium browser in the cloud that you drive with Puppeteer, Playwright or an agent framework. Their pricing pages look comparable too: a free tier, a small plan, a production plan, custom enterprise. The numbers underneath are not comparable at all, because the two vendors round time differently, and rounding decides the bill far more than the plan price does.

Every figure below was read firsthand on 26 September 2026: the Browserless pricing page and the plan data it loads, and the Browserbase pricing page and its plans documentation. Where a number is our own calculation, we show the division.

Browserless vs Browserbase pricing, plan by plan

Two lines in that table matter more than the rest. Browserless rounds each connection up to the next 30 seconds. Browserbase rounds each session up to the next minute and never charges less than one. Everything else is secondary to how your code opens and closes browsers.

Which is cheaper per page?

It depends on the session pattern, so here is the same workload priced four ways. Costs are per 1,000 sessions at the in-plan rate of Browserless Starter on monthly billing ($0.00111 a unit) and Browserbase Startup ($0.0033 a minute). The division is ours.

Browserless wins every row on the in-plan rate, and wins big on short sessions, where the one-minute minimum makes Browserbase pay for 55 seconds nobody used. The comparison changes in three places, and they are the ones to check against your own workload.

First, overage. Past the allowance Browserbase Startup charges $0.10 an hour and Browserless Starter $0.0017 a unit, which is $0.20 an hour. A team that routinely runs past its plan pays half as much per extra hour on Browserbase. Second, session length. Browserless caps a session at 30 minutes on Starter and 60 on Scale, while Browserbase allows 6 hours, so long-running agents that keep state all afternoon only fit one of them. Third, the monthly commitment. If you need about 500 browser hours, Browserbase Startup covers them for $99. On Browserless the same 500 hours are 60,000 units, which means Starter at $200, or Prototyping at $35 plus about $80 of overage. Browserless is cheaper per hour, but only once your volume fills its larger plan.

What do proxies and captchas add?

On both vendors the add-ons can outrun the browser time. Browserless draws everything from one unit pool: residential proxy traffic at 6 units per MB, datacenter traffic at 2 units per MB, and 10 units per solved captcha. A 2 MB page through a residential proxy is 12 units of bandwidth plus 1 of browser time, which turns $1.11 per 1,000 pages on Starter into about $14.44. Add a captcha on every page and it climbs by another $11.11.

Browserbase bills proxies as their own line, with bandwidth included in the plan (1 GB on Developer, 5 GB on Startup) and then $12 or $10 per GB, billed by the MB with a one-MB minimum per session. Captcha solving is listed as an included capability on the paid plans. For a captcha-heavy target that is the cheaper structure. For proxy-heavy work at volume, Browserless on Starter at about $6.67 per GB undercuts Browserbase overage by roughly a third.

When is Browserless the better buy?

Browserless suits scrapers and test suites that open many short sessions: one page, one screenshot, one PDF, then close. Its 30-second rounding charges those jobs close to what they actually use, it offers REST endpoints for screenshots, PDFs and page content on top of the raw browser, and it is the only one of the two you can self-host if procurement wants the browsers inside your own cloud. Yearly billing takes 30 percent off and raises concurrency, so it rewards a steady workload you can commit to.

When is Browserbase the better buy?

Browserbase suits AI agents that hold one session for a long time, log in, and work through a multi-step task. Six-hour sessions, session replay and live view for debugging, included captcha solving and a cheaper overage rate all point at that job, and the Stagehand framework is built around it. An agent that drives a real browser also reads a lot of untrusted page text, and some of that text will try to give it instructions, so teams running agents in production tend to add prompt injection screening between the page and the model before they widen the agent's permissions.

Browserbase also sells a Fetch API that returns page content without starting a browser: 1,000 calls included (10,000 on Startup), then $0.50 to $1 per 1,000 raw, or $4 per 1,000 as markdown or JSON. It does not execute JavaScript and stops at 5 MB, so it covers static pages only.

What if your code only reads pages?

Then you are paying for a browser to render a page so your script can parse it, and both meters charge you for capability you never use. This is the most common way these bills get large: an agent or pipeline where 80 percent of steps are reads, routed through the same browser as the 20 percent that click.

We sell the read side of that, so weigh this accordingly. ClawEngine is a crawl API: you send a URL or a seed and a schema, it renders the JavaScript, walks the site and returns clean markdown or typed JSON, billed per page. That is $0.98 per 1,000 pages on Hobby, $0.40 on Startup and $0.27 on Scale, with no connection to hold open and no rounding. It does not drive a browser, log in, solve captchas or use proxies, so for the action steps you still need Browserless or Browserbase. Our Browserless pricing breakdown works through the unit arithmetic plan by plan, the Firecrawl vs Browserbase cost comparison prices the same per-minute meter against page credits, and the guide to cutting agent browser hours with a crawl API shows how to split reads from actions in an existing agent.

Is Browserless or Browserbase cheaper for AI agents?

For short agent steps that open a browser, act and close, Browserless is cheaper because it rounds to 30 seconds and Browserbase charges a full minute per session. For long stateful agents that run past an hour or go over the plan allowance, Browserbase is cheaper and the only one of the two that allows 6-hour sessions. Most real agents mix both, which is why the session pattern should decide, not the plan card.

Does Browserbase charge a minimum per session?

Yes. Browserbase bills browser time by the minute, rounded, with a one-minute minimum per session, and proxy bandwidth by the MB with a one-MB minimum. A session that lasts 5 seconds bills as a full minute, which is $3.30 per 1,000 sessions on Startup. Reusing sessions with its keep-alive feature is the documented way to avoid paying that minimum repeatedly.

How many Browserless units is one browser hour?

One hour is 120 units, because each unit covers up to 30 seconds on a connection. That is about $0.21 an hour on Prototyping, $0.13 on Starter and $0.12 on Scale at monthly rates, and $0.15, $0.09 and $0.08 billed yearly. Past the allowance, overage makes it $0.24, $0.20 and $0.18 an hour.

Which one should you buy?

Log one week of real sessions before you sign: how many sessions, how long each lasts, and how many MB each pushes through a proxy. If most sessions are under a minute, Browserless costs less. If they run for many minutes, need captchas solved, or regularly blow past the plan, Browserbase costs less. And if most of the traffic is reading pages rather than acting on them, move that share to a JavaScript rendering API that bills per page, and keep a browser vendor only for the steps that need hands.