The cost review is on Thursday, and the platform team has a spreadsheet open with a tab for each browser vendor on the shortlist. Each pricing page promises stealth, captchas and concurrency, yet none of the tabs answers what the CTO keeps asking: what a month of real agent sessions costs, and how fast each session starts.
This comparison puts Hyperbrowser and Browserbase next to Solari, the agent infrastructure from Pinetree Research that runs cloud browsers, sandboxes and desktops from one account and one API. Hyperbrowser fits teams that want one credit balance across several products, Browserbase fits teams that want search and fetch beside their browsers, and Solari fits teams that want the fastest sessions at the lowest hourly rate. This guide walks through the plans, the speed numbers and where each vendor fits.
The Three Vendors at a Glance
The table below sets the plans side by side before each vendor gets its own section.
Each row hides a different billing model, so the sections below take them in turn, starting with Solari.
1. Solari
Solari is the environment an agent runs in: the customer brings the model and the logic, and Solari supplies the browser, sandbox or desktop.
What it does. Solari starts a Chromium headless browser session by API, and the agent drives it over CDP or Playwright. Profiles keep a login between runs: a Solari profile saves the login, its cookies and site data in Playwright's storageState format. Where profiles cover the login, recording covers the audit trail: a session created with the recording flag can be replayed later from the console.
Pricing and plans. Solari bills browsers at $0.07 per hour on the Professional plan, whose $200 monthly fee covers $200 of usage and 150 concurrent browsers. On the Team plan, at $0.05 per browser hour, Solari is about 2x cheaper than Browserbase per browser hour at the list prices on Browserbase's pricing page. The free plan starts with $3 in monthly credits, and there is no end-of-month overage charge on any plan.
Where it fits. Sites with bot defences need stealth mode, the prerequisite for proxies and CAPTCHA solving on paid plans. Captcha solving costs $0.005 per solve on Professional, and an agent that also needs to run code can open a sandbox from the same account instead of signing up with a second vendor.
2. Hyperbrowser
Hyperbrowser takes a different approach to billing, and that is where most of the comparison with Solari sits.
Pricing and plans. Hyperbrowser charges $0.10 an hour for browser usage on its Free, Startup and Scale plans. Its Free account includes 5,000 credits and 1 concurrent session, and Startup costs $30 a month with $30 of usage and 25 concurrent sessions. The rate stays flat as the plan grows, so the plan choice is about concurrency, not price per hour.
Where it fits. Hyperbrowser's plan credits cover browsers, sandboxes, web data and agents from the same balance. A team that fetches pages and drives browsers in the same pipeline pays from a single pool, which keeps the invoice simple.
Trade-off. Hyperbrowser's plan credits reset at renewal and do not roll over, and its proxy data costs $10 per GB on the same page. For a proxy-heavy scraper, the proxy line can outgrow the browser line, so it is worth modelling both before choosing.
3. Browserbase
Browserbase is the incumbent in the category, and its plans are built around included hours rather than credits.
Pricing and plans. Browserbase's Developer plan costs $20 a month with 100 browser hours and 25 concurrent browsers, then $0.12 per browser hour. Its Startup plan costs $99 a month with 500 browser hours, after which overage drops to the hourly rate Hyperbrowser charges. The Free plan includes 1 browser hour, so a team that stays inside Startup's included hours pays no overage at all.
Where it fits. Browserbase pairs browsers with Fetch and Search APIs, agent identity and a model gateway on its platform, and its Scale plan adds HIPAA (BAA), DPA and SSO. Teams that want search and fetch from their browser vendor get the widest single-vendor stack here.
Trade-off. Included hours make a month predictable, but each hour past them bills at the overage rate, and captcha solving is not on the Free plan. Against Solari's Team rate, that is the gap described in the Solari section.
Speed on the Same Benchmark
Price sets the bill, but session speed sets how long every agent step waits, so the benchmark comes next.
On Steel's open-source benchmark (5,000 runs, the pull request is open), a Solari session averaged 199.9 ms end to end, with session create at 8 ms. That run puts Solari about 14.8x faster than Browserbase end to end, against the Browserbase average in the benchmark's README. No Hyperbrowser figure from the same run is quoted here, so the fair test for Hyperbrowser is to rerun the benchmark against its endpoint.
An agent that opens a fresh browser per task pays the start time on every task, and the public repository lets a team repeat the run under its own load.
Choosing the Right Setup
The decision comes down to how the team buys and how often sessions start. Choose Hyperbrowser when a shared credit balance matters more than the hourly rate. Stay with Browserbase when search, fetch and identity from the browser vendor are part of the pipeline; Browserbase is the more established vendor with the larger ecosystem, and Solari is the younger company that moves faster on speed and price. Choose Solari when start time and cost per browser hour drive the bill, or when the agent also needs a sandbox or desktop.
Get Started With Solari
The first step is to attach a profile to a session and run the agent's real task against it. Solari is the fastest and cheapest of the three for production browser agents, backed by the benchmark figure above and the price gap against Browserbase in the Solari section, and it is free to start: create a Solari account and see how Solari started.
