Show HN: BrowserBoxPro – the remote browser with source code

I started building this in late 2018 as a way to deliver web scraping script builder application on any device with a single codebase without any download, i.e., "clientless"-- so there's no need to build a mobile app, and electron app, that uses WebView, with two separate codebases (or go hybrid?), to give the web scraping script builder the widest possible distribution.

At some point I factored out this "WebView tag for the open web" and turned that layer of the scraping system into a bonafide project in its own right. Eventually it became a product, then the major product that my little company sells.

I'm still figuring out the right business model, but a combination of licensing, installs (on prem), building white-label customizations, and experiments with SaaS have kept us afloat.

I also like the provocative move of being the only "RBI" product that has its source code in the open. First, it was just the "community edition", but recently I put the whole shebang (Pro et al) online (but with a non-commercial, non "Open Source" license, to be sure--while making the regular CE version finally "Open Source" albeit with AGPL-3.0 (I think forever this time! Haha :P :) xx ;p).

I think the next step for us here is going to be experimenting with a SaaS offering, maybe lead by some sort of cool free demo. The way pricing works on the smaller cloud providers, actually makes RBI (even with its bandwidth hungry real-time streaming aspect), very affordable (as long as, for the sake of COGS, you avoid GCP and AWS). We also want to get into the cloud custom VPS image marketplace, stack scripts, etc.

As it stands the deploy script should work for Debian and MacOS. Let me know if you try it out and encounter any issues! You can reach out: cris@dosyago.com

I'm still not convinced that RBI is the "wave of the future" for cybersecurity, I think of it more as an interesting virtualization layer that can power multiple applications, web scraping and automation being just one. Think of a "virtualized" browser extension API, without the gatekeeping of the Web Store, that's not closed, but open for all to extend.

That's one of the things that the power of this model brings.