The Cheapest Way to Run Browser Agents in Production (2026 Guide)

The agent fleet's invoice came in higher than last month, and nobody had shipped anything new. The usage export told the story: browsers left open after crashed scripts, stealth switched on for pages that never blocked anybody, and the same login typed again on every run.

The cheapest way to run browser agents in production is to pay only for browser time that does work: close every session in code, keep stealth, proxies and captcha solving for the sites that demand them, reuse logins, and pick the plan whose hourly rate matches your volume. Solari bills browsers per hour while a session is open, so each of those habits lands directly on the bill. This guide walks through the levers in the order they usually pay off.

How Browser Agent Costs Add Up

Before cutting anything, it helps to see where the money goes. On Solari, everything an agent uses (browsers, sandboxes, VMs, proxies and captcha solves) draws from a single credit balance. Browsers bill by the hour while a session is open, proxy traffic bills per GB and captcha solving bills per solve.

That makes the cost of a fleet a short sum: open session time multiplied by the hourly rate, plus proxy gigabytes, plus solves. The rate is fixed by your plan, but every other input is set by your code. Open time is the input your code controls most directly, so it comes first.

Close Every Session You Open

A browser that nobody closes keeps billing until something else ends it. On Solari, a session opened with launch() is shut down and cleaned up by close(), which is safe to call from a finally block that runs whether the agent's task succeeds or throws:

const browser = await client.launch()
try {
  const page = await browser.newPage()
  await page.goto(targetUrl)
  // ...the agent's task...
} finally {
  await browser.close()
}

const browser = await client.launch()
try {
  const page = await browser.newPage()
  await page.goto(targetUrl)
  // ...the agent's task...
} finally {
  await browser.close()
}

const browser = await client.launch()
try {
  const page = await browser.newPage()
  await page.goto(targetUrl)
  // ...the agent's task...
} finally {
  await browser.close()
}

If your code creates sessions with sessions.create() and connects its own client, release them with release(id) or releaseAndWait(id) in the same kind of block. That release pattern covers normal runs, and the plan's session cap covers the rest: 1 hour on Free, 5 hours on Starter and 24 hours on Professional. Treat that cap as a backstop for bugs, not as the timer that ends your runs, because every hour up to it is billed. With idle time gone, the next cost is the mode each session runs in.

Turn on Stealth, Proxies and Captcha Only Where Sites Block

The cheapest session is the plain kind, and on Solari it is the default. Every Solari session option is opt-in, so a new session is a fast headless browser with no profile, recording, proxy or stealth. That default is Solari's cheapest browser mode, while stealth bills at a higher per-second rate, so start with the default and switch to stealth the moment a site shows blocks or challenge pages.

Proxies and captcha solving require stealth, and both add their own line to the bill. A proxy routes traffic through another IP and bills per GB, at $6.00 on Starter and $4.00 on Professional, while solving a CAPTCHA costs $0.01 per solve on Starter. Solari's blockHeavy setting cuts the proxy line further: it makes the browser refuse video, audio and large images so they never cross the proxy, which matters on media-heavy pages.

So the rule is per site, not per fleet: a pipeline that visits public pages and a single protected site should run stealth only for that site's sessions. Repeated logins are the next place a fleet pays twice.

Reuse Logins Instead of Paying for Them

Signing in on every run costs open session time, and on protected sites it can also cost proxy traffic and a solve. Solari profiles remove that step: a profile saves the login, cookies and site data, so the agent does not have to sign in again. The agent signs in once, through the console editor or by uploading a Playwright storageState.json, and later sessions pass profileId to start already signed in.

Profiles hold cookies and per-origin storage, so treat them like passwords: anyone with the API key can attach one and act as that account. The Professional plan includes up to 500 profiles, enough for a separate login per site or per account. With the waste trimmed, the last lever is the rate itself.

Pick the Plan That Matches Your Volume

The hourly browser rate falls at every plan step, and the drop is steepest at the top. The chart below shows the published rate on each plan:

Self-serve plan fees come back as usage: Starter's $20 a month and Professional's $200 a month are returned as credits that refill monthly and do not roll over. Usage is billed only up to the balance on the account, which caps a month's spend at the credits the team holds, even for a fleet that ran hot.

Beyond self-serve, Solari recommends Team at 10,000 total hours per month and Enterprise at 100,000. Enterprise bills browsers at a tenth of Team's rate, so a fleet approaching that volume should talk to sales before it adds more workers.

Choosing the Right Setup

Running browser agents cheaply in production comes down to four habits: close every session in code, keep stealth and its add-ons for the sites that block, reuse logins through profiles, and move up a plan when the hours justify it. The order matters, because the first three shrink the hours that the last prices. Solari's launch overview explains how the same account also runs sandboxes and desktops when an agent needs more than a browser.

Get Started With Solari

Start by wrapping your agent's sessions in a finally block and running a day of normal traffic, then read the usage before you change plans. Solari is built to be the fastest and cheapest place for that job: it launches a browser in 8 ms, the Free plan includes $3 of monthly credits, and the plan rates above keep the hours cheap as the fleet grows. Create a free Solari account and run your first fleet today.