Browserbase is cloud infrastructure that runs headless Chromium browsers on demand for AI agents and automation workflows. Developers connect Playwright, Puppeteer, or Selenium to a single API endpoint and Browserbase spins up isolated, managed sessions across a global fleet, handling proxies, residential IPs, stealth fingerprints, and CAPTCHA solving transparently. Every session comes with recorded video, DOM snapshots, and network logs through the built-in Session Replay console, which makes debugging agent runs practical instead of archaeological.
On top of the core browser runtime, Browserbase ships several agent-specific APIs: a Fetch and Search API for quick token-efficient lookups without paying the cost of full browser sessions, Agent Identity for persistent logins and long-term account access, and a Runtime that deploys packaged agent code next to the browser fleet. A new Model Gateway proxies major LLMs through the Browserbase API key so teams avoid juggling separate provider credentials and get unified billing per agent. The company also maintains Stagehand, an open-source TypeScript SDK that lets agents blend deterministic Playwright actions with natural-language commands like `page.act('click the login button')`.
Browserbase pricing is session-based with a limited free tier, a Developer plan starting around $39/month, and Scale plans from roughly $100/month that unlock higher concurrent sessions, residential proxies, and enterprise controls. The service fits teams building browser-using agents — shopping bots, research assistants, QA crawlers, scraping pipelines — that outgrow self-hosted Playwright but do not want to maintain their own Kubernetes and proxy stack. Main trade-offs are price versus rolling your own browser fleet and a smaller stealth-proxy pool than dedicated scrapers like Bright Data, though Browserbase's tight Stagehand integration is unmatched for agent-first workloads.
