Launch HN: Simplex (YC S24) – Browser automation platform for developers
simplex.shTo be transparent, we're an early startup, and a big part of that is user validation. We've been lucky to have companies as small as 5 people sign onto our $2500/month plan -- it shows some commitment on their side and helps us understand whether it's a real problem for our users. That's the same reason the $2500/month plan isn't self serve (you have to talk to us first).
We're definitely thinking of adding a pay as you go plan! But we aren't there yet re: our understanding of the market, if that makes sense.
If you want to set up monthly billing in Coupa, you just manually create 12 invoices and schedule them out. Each time you have to retype all the account information from scratch, and there are a few landmine buttons on the page that will clear all the forms and make you start from scratch. I can't imagine the thousands of human hours lost every year to just filling out fields in Coupa.
Re: Puppeteer automation as part of the script -- we have a feature we wrote for one of our customers that we didn't promote to production where you can define a deterministic action in the dashboard that allows you to paste in JavaScript, but we're likely not to push that to prod anytime soon. Could you explain your reasoning for wanting to use Puppeteer still? We've generally seen customers fully switch over to Simplex instead of relying on their original Puppeteer/Playwright scripts -- since we have action caching, the underlying script (click on div locator with this div id, etc.) is pretty similar to what you'd get using Playwright.
As someone who has spent a LOT of my time in my career working on browser automation and testing, speed and cost was always key. Even with existing programmatic tools like selenium, playwright, cypress, etc speed and headfull hosting costs were already big issues. This seems orders of magnitude slower and more expensive. Curious how you pitch this to potential customers.
Edit: I just re-ran the demo and it seemed way faster this time??? the first time it said GOAL: PRESS_ENTER... (agent proceeds to think about it for 5-8 seconds) which seemed hilarious to me.
We also have an example of a complex, multi-agent workflow here that might be useful for you to look at: https://www.simplex.sh/blog/context-engineering-for-web-agen...
I suppose if you are hitting your target demographic dead-on with your marketing efforts, the value prop should be completely obvious to them, but still could be more explicit in your differentiation.
It really sucks to block an entire service, just because a few of its users can't control themselves. At the same time a lot of SaaS providers makes it impossible to report a single user/tenant and getting a paying user banned just isn't happening.
We gate full access to the platform partially for this reason. We debated giving fewer than 50 free browser sessions, for example, and have already banned a few accounts from our self-serve today that were unidentifiable/"company accounts" without a legitimate web presence.
One think I might add: limit how many requests per second your clients can make. Even if they can just scrape a small set of sites, they can still hammer a site into the ground. One of the things I think Google has been doing really well since their start is knowing when to back of a site. So either rate-limit your clients, or back of a site if you see responses slowing down.
We just had a company hit one of our sites pretty heavily, and when asking them of back off a bit, they just asked if we could perhaps rate-limit them. Apparently they don't know how to reduce their traffic themselves.