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Comment by mrskitch | Hacker News Reader

(Author here): lots of comments about why would someone pay for this. I think the answer is simple if you step out of your developer shoes.

There's a lot of complexity in managing and even building the thing from the start -- and then you have to support it. If you're working in a large org then there's a chance that you can just DIY it, however for small-medium businesses this isn't practical and it's a waste of time (their most precious resource).

I like to think of it as a managed database. Sure, you can freely download postgres in a container and you're up and going, however there's a lot more costs to it than just that. Having a fully-managed database saves you time and other non-tangibles that it can be worth the cost. Just depends on your circumstances.

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When I worked for a large tech company I spent a few months building a similar service for internal use. I can confirm, managing all of those instances and making it reliable can be a huge headache. I really wish using browserless was an option for us

Heads up that the article's first link to your site is broken

The link is showing up as https://sourcesort.com/interview/browserless.io instead of https://browserless.io

Single founder/developer here and paying for browserless. I really don't have the time to spin up something similar myself.

Since you're reading this, a feature request: I would love it if you could put up a REST endpoint for extracting all the images (example code here [1]) on a web page, and more endpoints for extracting all the links, script addresses, etc.

I was trying to do that on Browserless but couldn't get the final file download to work (I adapted Stack Overflow code linked below to put all the web pages images into a ZIP file and download that) - presently I'm running this on a Google Cloud Function, which is working but I'd rather outsource it to you, especially since the function chokes on large web pages (possibly it needs more RAM than the 2GB limit currently available in GCF?).

[1] https://stackoverflow.com/a/52542490

Noted ;)

Just to follow up, you can use our /scrape API to do this:

curl -X POST \ https://chrome.browserless.io/scrape \ -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \ -d '{ "url": "https://reddit.com/", "elements": [{ "selector": "img" }] }'

This will get all the <img> tags on a page and return their attributes (which includes their sources). If you wanted to do scripts as well, just add a new object to the elements array with the "selector" of "script".

Haven't read the article but I used to develop a kiosk application that used headless Chrome and holy fuck is that a complicated endeavor. It wouldn't be if browsers were content to simply be browsers, but Chrome has so many stupid value-adds and telemetry points that care+feeding of the Chrome (later Chromium) instances took up a substancial part of my job. At one point we toyed with a simply pyGTK app that loaded a webview but there were issues with that as well. The browser space really needs to return to its roots.

Am I reading your website wrong, or is your hosted solution cheaper than the on-prem license (360/yr vs 500)? I would think it would be much more expensive to run it for them, right?

Nope, you've got it right. We're increasing prices next, however your sentiment is still true. Once we have the enterprise-flavor out the inverse will be true.

Interesting. Unrelated question, is it easier to start a side business since you work for a remote company? (Had to do some stalking to find this out.) I imagine you might have more time to do these kind of things because you presumably don't have to deal with a commute.

Commute was nearly 3 hours for me back when I had to do it. I'd say being remote certainly can help, but has it's own drawbacks as well.

For instance, if you're already programming and working 8+ hours a day in your home, the last thing you want to do is more of it. One of the biggest things you'll want to do is get out more often since you're home a lot, and staying home to work on a side-project doesn't sound awfully appealing.

On-prem would have a greater support burden.

Enterprise tax. On-prem licenses are going to be used by large enterprises, who are more challenging to do business with, so you need to charge them more.

A solution to run non-headless Chrome browsers in the cloud would be welcome. We used Sikuli and now UI.Vision RPA for test automation, and have to manage the servers for it ourself. If I could outsource this to a service like browserless, it would be convenient. (Applitools was an option I looked at)

The web app we are testing right now (SaaS for architects) makes heavy use of canvas elements and can't be tested headless.

So how do you test such applications?

FWIW you can run non-headlessly: https://docs.browserless.io/docs/chrome-flags.html#setting-h...

Congrats on the product!

Just as a bit of feedback, on the linked site you write:

>Browserless is simply a tiny web-server that “productionalizes” all the stuff about headless browsers and their automation capabilities.

I find that both hard to parse (productionalizes? wat) and saying nothing. How about "a tiny web-server that helps you use headless browsers without the hassle of setting them up on your environment"

++ getting the wordage on _what_ it does and why you'd use it can be tough.

At two of my previous jobs this would have been a really great resource, and I can immediately think of a few hobby projects I've been thinking about that would be much easier with this. You're dead on too when you talk about the time investment being a big hurdle for companies- this is a great product and I'm excited that it's also open source!

Great work, mate! I can totally see why someone (e.g. a company) would pay for this. I've also featured Browserless on SaaSHub https://www.saashub.com/featured. Hopefully it's helpful to more people.

I've definitely come across your site multiple times, and I can say with absolute certainty it's helpful!

I looked closely at Browserless a while ago, for a 15 - dev company it would be a good tool. I would have recommended it but circumstances (particularly a lot of effort put into a container setup that could already run these kinds of tests) means it made sense to keep everything working the same way in our k8s. But definitely this is a good offering for small businesses.

The only downside to using a lot of IaaS type stuff like this is almost every month something goes down - Github or Azure or Appveyor etc, and this is another thing that could go down, even for a few minutes, and basically the CI is stuffed, or pingdom goes heywire. But this is a more general problem with cloudifying all the things, not with this particular service.

The startup I worked for a few years ago was an early customer of Browserless (one of the first maybe?). We had a large crawling system we were developing and used Browserless as a time saving way to scale up interfacing with headless chrome. Joel worked with us directly to address issues and bugs and freed us up to focus on our crawlers and not on managing distributed headless chrome.

Hey! Great to see you here! We’re you with knotch?

Yup! I left about a year and a half ago. Congrats on the success of Browserless.

Obligatory link to the famous HN Dropbox comment: https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=9224

When thinking about the viability of a business, developers commonly make the mistake of assuming that nobody would pay for something that's possible for them to code up themselves.

Sure, many of us write code all day and love it. But most people have other responsibilities, value their time highly, and (correctly) prefer to pay reasonable amounts of money so they can spend their time doing more important or profitable things.

I find this post kind of snake oil sell. It begings explaining the problem it wants to solve (lack of a modern text/console based browser) to directly enter in a very long history about why he did that (thats not a5 all useful for the people wanting a tl;dr summary). The first thing i miss about this is how this thing compares to brow.sh abd why i should pay for this instead of deploying my own brow.sh instance

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