The finance lead forwarded another wallet top-up receipt to the agent team with a short note asking what the reloads were paying for. The engineer who built the pipeline opened the usage export and found minutes, steps and checks billed side by side, each on its own meter. By the afternoon the question had changed from what the agent cost to where else it could run.
TinyFish sells web-agent infrastructure as metered products with no plans or minimums, and teams look elsewhere when concurrency, the browser rate or the bundled model stops fitting. The strongest TinyFish alternatives are Solari, Browserbase, Hyperbrowser, Steel and Kernel, and Solari leads for teams that bring their own agent: it starts sessions fastest on an open benchmark and runs browsers, sandboxes and desktops from one account. This guide covers why teams look past TinyFish, then what each alternative costs and where it fits.
Reasons to Consider an Alternative to TinyFish
The search for another vendor usually starts with something on the bill, so the TinyFish model comes first. TinyFish says TinyBrowser costs $0.002 per minute with a limit of five concurrent sessions, and TinyAgent costs $0.016 per step with two concurrent runs, on TinyFish's pricing page. Runs include LLM inference, residential proxies and anti-bot handling, per the same TinyFish page.
Three events tend to follow. A cost review turns the per-minute rate into hours, and TinyBrowser comes to $0.12 per browser hour at list on TinyFish's pricing. A fleet outgrows the pay-as-you-go concurrency, and raising it means an Enterprise contract. Or the team wants its own model in charge, with a headless browser underneath and a place to run the code the agent writes.
Each alternative answers those events differently, and the table below sorts them before the details.
The Alternatives at a Glance
The table gives each vendor's niche in a few words, with TinyFish as the reference row.
Solari comes first because it answers all three events from the same account.
1. Solari
Solari is the environment an agent runs in: the customer brings the model and the logic, and Solari supplies the browser, the machine and the screen. That is the main design difference from TinyFish, and it is the idea behind how Solari started.
Core capabilities. A Solari cloud browser is a Chromium session started by API and driven over CDP or Playwright, with stealth and proxy settings chosen per session. Solari profiles save a login, its cookies and site data in Playwright's storageState format. An agent signs in once, and every later session reopens the same cookies.
Speed. On Steel's open-source benchmark, across 5,000 runs with Solari's results in a pull request that is still open, Solari averaged 199.9 ms end to end, with session create at 8 ms. That makes Solari about 4x faster than Kernel, about 4.5x faster than Steel and about 14.8x faster than Browserbase on the same benchmark repo. TinyFish is not on that benchmark, so the fair test against it is a side-by-side run on a real task.
Beyond browsers. The same account opens Solari sandboxes for agent-generated code, with commands, files, snapshot and fork. Solari desktops are full Linux computers with a screen for computer-use models, and the docs say each starts usually in about a second. An agent that browses, runs code and checks a desktop app stays on one API key and one bill.
Pricing and plans. Solari's Free plan has no monthly fee and $3 in monthly credits, and the Professional plan is $200 a month with browsers at $0.07 per hour and 150 concurrent browsers, on Solari's pricing page. The Team rate drops to $0.05 per browser hour, and there is no end-of-month overage charge. At list price Solari is about 2x cheaper per browser hour than Browserbase and about 1.6x cheaper than Steel, and Professional also undercuts the TinyBrowser hourly figure above.
Who it's best for. Teams that run their own agent and need fast sessions, saved logins and code execution from the same account. Solari browsers speak CDP and Playwright, the interfaces most browser agents already use, so a trial can run on a real workload.
2. Browserbase
Browserbase is the incumbent of the category, and its plans look most like the TinyFish bundle.
Pricing and plans. Browserbase says its Developer plan is $20 a month with 25 concurrent browsers and 100 browser hours, then $0.12 per browser hour, on Browserbase's pricing page. Its Startup plan is $99 a month with 500 browser hours on the same Browserbase page. A team inside the included hours pays a flat fee, and overage is where the bill grows.
Where it shines. Browserbase includes search and fetch calls beside its browsers, starting at 1,000 search calls a month on every plan, per Browserbase's plans. A team replacing TinySearch, TinyFetch and TinyAgent finds the same pieces under one vendor.
Trade-off. The Free plan caps sessions at 15 minutes and leaves out CAPTCHA solving, per Browserbase's pricing page. Teams used to free search and fetch pay for those calls past the included allowance, so search volume belongs in the estimate.
3. Hyperbrowser
Hyperbrowser is the closest match to TinyFish's per-step agent pricing, with browsers on the same rate card.
Pricing and plans. Hyperbrowser says its Startup plan is $30 a month with $30 of usage included and 25 concurrent sessions, on Hyperbrowser's pricing page. Browsers bill at $0.10 per hour, and HyperAgent and Browser Use runs at $0.02 per step, on the same Hyperbrowser page. The step prices sit close to TinyAgent's, so the comparison comes down to concurrency and what each step includes.
Where it shines. Hyperbrowser sells browsers, sandboxes, web data APIs and agents under one account, with fetch at $0.001 per page and search at $0.005 per query, per Hyperbrowser's pricing. Scraping endpoints and hosted agents stay with one vendor.
Trade-off. Plan credits reset at renewal and do not roll over, and ultra stealth mode is Enterprise only, per Hyperbrowser's plans. Agents on heavily protected sites should budget for the top tier.
4. Steel
Steel comes from open source, which suits teams that may want to run the browser themselves later.
Pricing and plans. Steel says its Launch plan has no monthly fee, only usage at $0.10 per browser hour with 10 concurrent sessions and sessions up to 15 minutes, on Steel's pricing page. Scale is $250 a month plus usage at $0.08 per browser hour, with 100 concurrent sessions and sessions up to 1 hour, on the same Steel page. A team leaving a no-minimum model can start on Launch, then step to Scale when concurrency matters.
Where it shines. Steel says Steel Browser is open source and can be self-hosted, on Steel's pricing page. A team that wants the same browser on its own machines has that option.
Trade-off. The Launch plan has no stealth browser, which Steel includes on Enterprise, per Steel's plans. Agents that relied on TinyFish's built-in anti-bot handling should price that contract early.
5. Kernel
Kernel is browser infrastructure for agents with managed logins, and its billing rewards agents that sit idle between steps.
Pricing and plans. Kernel says its Start-Up plan is $200 a month plus usage with $50 in monthly credits and 150 concurrent browsers, on Kernel's pricing page. Headless browsers bill at $0.0000166667 per second of active runtime, per Kernel's pricing docs. Kernel publishes no hourly browser price, so an estimate needs the team's own active minutes.
Where it shines. Kernel says a browser enters standby within seconds of its last CDP or Live View activity and stops accruing usage, per Kernel's pricing docs. An agent that waits on a model between page actions pays for the time it works, not the time it thinks.
Trade-off. Active-runtime billing is precise but harder to forecast than an hourly rate, since the bill depends on how long agents pause. HIPAA is Enterprise only, per Kernel's pricing docs.
Choosing the Right Setup
The choice comes down to who runs the model, how the bill is counted and what the agent needs beside a browser. Choose Browserbase for search beside browsers, Hyperbrowser for per-step hosted agents, Steel to self-host and Kernel for idle-heavy agents; stay with TinyFish when a hosted agent with the model and anti-bot handling bundled is the product the team wants. Choose Solari when the team brings its own agent and session speed, the hourly rate and code execution decide the budget. TinyFish is the more established vendor with the larger ecosystem; Solari is the younger company and moves faster on speed and price.
Get Started With Solari
The first step is to point a single TinyFish job at a Solari browser, attach a profile, and run the same task on both side by side. Among the vendors compared here, Solari is the fastest, at the 199.9 ms average above, and the cheapest per browser hour, at the $0.05 Team rate, and it is free to start: create a Solari account.
