Sure, but there's a lot of other things you're looking over:

- We support selenium with the same version of Chrome as puppeteer's. Everything is versioned together.

- Queueing/Concurrency and notifications. Arguably done in other efforts, but works.

- Numerous other APIs built on top of puppeteer to do core cases. No need to write your own integration.

- Monitoring and more.

People do pay for this in order to not think about the burden of supporting it. Managed databases are a thing, even though they are freely available to download and run.

I'm a browserless user, and the headache for me was cost. You're right that it's dirt-simple to spin up a puppeteer service in docker, and that's what I had been doing previously. But, for my usage, I found it was cheaper to pay browserless than to run my own EC2 instances. Granted, I probably account for a very, very tiny fraction of that $24k/mo :)

I dove into the comments to ask the same question. I just did something similar to this with a few lines in my docker-compose.yml, which eventually turned into a few lines in a Helm chart. Why would I pay someone money for something as trivial as this?

Now, I won’t write another rant on the subject of Eternal September, and how our field is increasingly populated by charlatans who can’t do simple things on their own. But yes: that’s exactly how I feel.

Yep. Puppeteer is the state of the art wrt headless browsers. There's money to be made selling B2B wrappers of OS software though. Not to trivialize the author's work...

People who would rather pay $30/mo to have someone manage it than run it themselves.

Yea, I’m thinking making about a company named after some kind of low hanging fruit and just building out a bunch of these trivial little use cases that keep popping up and put them all behind a subscription model.

You’ll probably see me with an article in 6 months about how I’m making $150k/mo for about 2% of my time.