F.A.Q.

The Utility API is priced based on the number of requests. For every 1 successful API request, you’re billed exactly 1 credit.

Check your account dashboard for a breakdown of your usage.

The Websocket API is priced based on session duration. For every 30 seconds of activity (rounded up), you’re billed exactly 1 credit.

For example, a session that lasts 4 minutes and 20 seconds would cost exactly 9 credits.

Check your account dashboard for a breakdown of your usage.

If you go over your plan’s credit limit, you’ll be charged for exactly how many extra credits you spend.

That said, we don’t ever want to surprise you with runaway costs. So we maintain dynamic values for your account’s soft limit and hard limit.

Your soft limit defaults to your monthly subscription, and your hard limit defaults to 2x your monthly subscription. For free plans, we set these values to $10 and $20, respectively.

When you cross your soft limit, we’ll send you a email asking you to approve an increase to your limits by an incremental amount. If you don’t approve the increase, as soon as you reach your hard limit, we will begin rejecting all requests. This block will persist until either the billing period ends or you approve the increase.

These emails will also invite you to upgrade your plan, but only when it’s cost-effective for you to do so. We will never take this action automatically.

Our plans vary in two ways: How many base credits are included, and how much overage credits cost. Base credits are billed at our lowest rate ($0.001/credit). Overage credits cost more, but become increasingly cheap as you climb our pricing tiers.

As such, our model incentivizes choosing the highest base plan that fits your usage.

Here’s how to optimize your costs:

1. If your usage is consistent, choose the plan that’s just above your average monthly costs.
2. If your usage varies dramatically from month to month, choose the plan that’s just below your average monthly usage.

These are rough guidelines. On the margins, you may be able to save a little with a more detailed analysis. But in most cases, this strategy will save you the most money.

You can change your plan at any time. Just pop over to your account’s billing page and make your changes.

When changing subscriptions, we’ll pro-rate the difference in cost. So if you upgrade plans half-way through the billing cycle, we’ll charge you the difference for the remainder of the cycle. And if you downgrade plans, we’ll save the difference as a credit toward your next billing cycle.

If you switch from monthly to annual billing or vice versa, we’ll still pro-rate the difference, and we’ll also change your billing date to today.

At the start of each month, we charge you for your plan’s base fee. If you’re on our Hobby plan, you aren’t billed at all.

During the month, if your overage fees ever exceed the cost of your base plan, we’ll issue an early charge. (For example, a user on the $50/month plan who uses an additional $50 in API credits will be billed early for $50.)

At the end of each month, we’ll bill you for any remaining overage fees.

We support Playwright, Puppeteer, and all CDP-based libraries. No matter your programming language of choice, one of these tools is certain to meet your needs.

We strongly advise new users to use Playwright. With great performance, awesome developer tools, major browser support, multiple programming language options, a huge community, and growing usage, we’re bullish on the library’s future.

We have no plans to support Selenium or Cypress, but we’re open to feedback. For any new requests, contact us.

We tune our browsers to look maximally like a real human browser. And we provide a wide range of browser config options to help you avoid detection. You can even connect a third-party proxy.

We are exploring solutions for in-house residential proxies, captcha solution APIs, and input humanization (e.g. natural mouse and keyboard movements).

If you would like to try out beta tools, contact us.

Yes! It can substantially speed up tests, scraping, and automation locally. Since you don’t have to run browsers locally, your throughput is easily 10x - 100x greater.

We recommend developing with local browsers until your browser automation becomes a bottleneck. Then switch to BrowserCat. Our starter repo uses separate commands for local vs cloud runs, making it easy to switch between them on the fly.

Since BrowserCat is built on open source technology, you can always migrate, either to a competitor or to internal hosting. The difference between using us and using your own browsers is a single line change:

// with BrowserCat
const browser = await pw.chromium.connect(bcatApiUrl);

// without BrowserCat
const browser = await pw.chromium.launch();