Browserbase vs Browserless Pricing and Cost per 1,000 Scraped Pages

Browserbase and Browserless sell the same thing at first glance: headless Chrome in someone else's data center, driven by your Playwright or Puppeteer code. Most teams shortlist both, open the two pricing pages, and find that one quotes hours and gigabytes while the other quotes units. Neither page tells you what a scraped page costs.

This article puts both on one scale. The rates were read from browserbase.com/pricing and browserless.io/pricing on October 13, 2026, in USD, monthly billing unless noted. We sell a scraping API that competes with both for one kind of work, reading pages, so we say plainly where each of them is the better buy and where neither is. The per vendor detail sits in our Browserbase pricing breakdown and Browserless pricing breakdown.

Browserbase and Browserless plans side by side

Browserbase's paid plans also bundle Fetch and Search API calls and a few managed agent runs. Browserless gives every plan, Free included, captcha solving and access to its residential and datacenter proxies, and lets paid plans bring their own proxies. Browserless's page opens on yearly prices, which are 30 percent lower, so make sure you compare monthly with monthly.

How Browserbase and Browserless meter a scraped page

Browserbase runs two meters. Browser time bills by the hour and is almost never the expensive part: a page read in a warm session takes about 5 seconds, so an hour covers 720 pages. Proxy traffic bills by the gigabyte, and a real browser pulls every script, font and image through the proxy.

Browserless runs one meter with three inputs. A unit is up to 30 seconds of one browser connection, and a reconnect starts a new one. Residential proxy traffic costs 6 units per MB and datacenter 2 units per MB. A solved captcha costs 10 units. Since a gigabyte of residential traffic is 6,000 units, its price per GB depends on your plan: about 6 USD at Scale's included rate, 9 USD at Scale's overage rate, and 10.50 to 12 USD on Prototyping.

That one conversion explains most of the comparison. Browserbase is cheaper on time. Browserless is cheaper on bytes once you are on Starter or Scale. Which meter dominates depends on how heavy your target pages are.

Cost per 1,000 pages on both

Same assumptions for both columns. Browserbase at 5 seconds of session time per page beyond the included allowance. Browserless at one unit of time per page, a fresh connection each, at the plan's included rate. Light means images, media and fonts blocked in your script, about 0.3 MB through the proxy. Full means the page loads as a visitor sees it, about 2 MB.

Two rows deserve a second look. The no proxy row favors Browserbase by a wide margin, but only because Browserless charges a full unit per fresh connection. Keep one Browserless connection open and load a page every 5 seconds and the time part drops to about a sixth of a unit, near 0.17 USD per 1,000 on Scale, which is a tie. The captcha row cuts the other way: if your targets throw a challenge on most pages, Browserless's 10 units per solve can erase its bandwidth advantage.

Monthly budgets at 50,000, 250,000 and 1,000,000 pages

Three workloads on sites that need residential proxies, on the cheapest plan of each vendor that fits, monthly billing with overage at the published rates.

At 50,000 light pages the two are 12 USD apart, and yearly billing on Browserless (140 USD for Starter) flips the result. At a million pages Browserbase is cheaper on list rates for light pages because Browserless's overage rate of 0.0015 USD per unit is higher than its included rate. Both vendors quote below list at that volume, Browserbase on Scale and Browserless on Enterprise, so get both quotes. The full page columns show what happens when nobody blocks images in the script: the bill grows roughly four to six times on either vendor.

Billing rules that change the real number

Browserless invoices overage in chunks. Overage is charged whenever it reaches the dollar amount of your plan, at a plan change, or at month end. A plan change resets your billing cycle and charges the full new plan that day.

Browserless reconnects cost a unit. Scrapers that open a new connection per page pay a full 30 second unit even when the page loads in 3 seconds. Reuse connections where you can.

Browserbase Fetch is not a browser. Its Fetch API is 1 USD per 1,000 plain calls on Developer, 0.50 on Startup and 4 USD with proxies on both, but it does not run JavaScript and has redirects off by default. Pages built in the browser still need a session, which puts you back on hours and gigabytes.

Free plans stop, paid plans keep going. On both vendors a paid plan bills overage rather than rejecting requests. A crawler bug that loads every image on a site through a residential proxy overnight is a real invoice line on either one.

Which one to pick for which job

Pick Browserbase for AI agents and automation that act on pages, for targets that do not need proxies, and for bursts of many short sessions on a small plan: Developer gives 25 concurrent browsers for 20 USD where Browserless Prototyping gives 5. Its session replays and the Stagehand framework are a strong reason on their own if your team builds agents. Teams that would rather buy a finished agent than build one can also browse a marketplace of ready made AI agents before committing to either platform.

Pick Browserless when pages are heavy and proxies are mandatory, when you expect to self host for compliance reasons later, or when you already pay for your own proxies and want to plug them in on a paid plan.

If your scripts only open URLs and read them, the question is a different one, covered next.

When neither Browserbase nor Browserless is the cheapest option

Both services bill the resources a browser consumes. That is the right model for work that drives a page and the wrong one for work that reads it, because the bill grows with page weight, retries and captchas you do not control. Retail catalogs, travel fares, marketplaces and job boards sit behind Cloudflare, DataDome or Akamai and need residential traffic on every request, which is exactly where both meters run hardest.

A scraping API bills the page instead. On our plans one successful page is 0.98 USD per 1,000 on Starter, 0.60 on Growth and 0.33 on Scale, with rotating residential and datacenter proxies, browser rendering, retries and field extraction in that price, and blocked pages are never billed. The 250,000 light pages that cost about 800 USD on either browser service are 149 USD on Growth. We wrote up the switch, including what does not move, on our Browserbase alternative for web scraping page, and every plan is on the pricing page.

What a scraping API will not do is click, type or log in. Keep those flows on a browser service and move the reading jobs. Most teams we talk to end up with both, and a much smaller browser bill.

Questions buyers ask

Is Browserbase cheaper than Browserless? For time it is: 0.10 to 0.12 USD per browser hour against about 0.12 to 0.21 USD for 120 Browserless units. For proxy traffic it is not once you are past entry plans: 10 to 12 USD per GB against roughly 6 to 9 USD on Browserless Scale. Light pages come out close; heavy pages favor Browserless.

What is the difference between Browserbase and Browserless? Both host headless browsers for Playwright and Puppeteer. Browserbase bills hours and proxy gigabytes separately and adds Fetch, Search, Stagehand and session replay. Browserless bills 30 second units that also pay for proxy megabytes and captcha solves, adds BrowserQL, and sells a license to self host.

Which is better for web scraping, Browserbase or Browserless? For scraping that needs logins or clicks, either works and the choice comes down to concurrency, page weight and self hosting. For reading protected pages at volume, a per page scraping API is usually three to twenty times cheaper than both.

Can I self host Browserbase? No. Browserbase is a hosted service; its Stagehand framework is open source, but the browsers run on Browserbase. Browserless sells a commercial license to run its service on your own infrastructure through its Enterprise plan.

Do Browserbase and Browserless include proxies? Browserbase includes 1 GB on Developer and 5 GB on Startup, then 12 or 10 USD per GB. Browserless includes proxy access on every plan and charges 6 units per MB residential and 2 per MB datacenter out of your unit pool.

Is there a cheaper alternative to Browserbase and Browserless for scraping? For reading pages, yes: a scraping API priced per successful page with proxies included. On WebScrap that is 0.33 to 0.98 USD per 1,000 pages whatever the page weighs. For agent work that clicks and types, the two browser services remain the right category.