The renewal call was on the calendar for Thursday, and the platform lead wanted a straight answer before it. The browser invoice had a plan fee, a credit line, browser hours and a short list of extras, and nobody on the agent team could say which line grew when the nightly jobs did.
Steel pricing is a plan fee plus usage: each plan includes credits, then bills browser hours, proxy bandwidth and CAPTCHA solves at its own rates. Solari bills the same browser work at an hourly rate drawn from a monthly credit balance that also covers sandboxes and desktops. This guide walks through what each Steel plan includes, what the extras cost, and what the same month costs on Solari.
What Each Steel Plan Includes
The plan grid is where every line on a Steel invoice starts, so it comes first. Steel says its Launch plan is $0 a month plus usage, with a $30 one-time credit, 10 concurrent browser sessions and sessions up to 15 minutes, on its pricing page. The Scale plan is $250 a month plus usage, with $100 of credits every month, 100 concurrent sessions and sessions up to 1 hour, per Steel.
Enterprise is a custom contract, and Steel says it covers 1,000+ concurrent sessions, reserved browser pools and sessions up to 24 hours. Scale also adds a dedicated Slack channel and a HIPAA-ready BAA, which is often the real reason a team moves off Launch.
The session limit deserves as much attention as the fee. An agent working through a long checkout or a slow back-office portal has to finish inside the plan's limit or be split across several headless browser sessions, and each restart costs a fresh login. With the plans mapped, the next line is the browser hour itself.
What a Browser Hour Costs on Steel
Usage is where a Steel bill moves from month to month, and the hourly rate sets how far. Steel says browser hours cost $0.10 on Launch and $0.08 on Scale, on its pricing page. Included credits are spent first, and every hour after them bills at the plan's rate.
The two plans treat credits differently. Launch's credit is a one-time grant, so once it is spent every hour is billed, while Scale refills its credit each month. Scale's fee is larger than its included credit, so part of the plan price pays for capacity and support rather than browser time.
For a steady workload, that is easy to forecast. Browser time is rarely the whole bill, though, and the extras come next.
What the Extras Cost on Each Platform
Proxy traffic and CAPTCHA solving sit beside browser hours on both platforms, priced per use. Steel says proxy bandwidth costs $10 per GB on Launch and $6 per GB on Scale, and CAPTCHA solves cost $3 per 1k on Launch and $1 per 1k on Scale, on its pricing page. Steel also says its stealth browser is included on Enterprise rather than Launch or Scale, with data retention of 7 days on Launch and 14 days on Scale.
Solari prices the same extras on the docs pricing page. Proxies are $6.00 per GB on Starter and $4.00 per GB on Professional, and captcha solving is $0.01 per solve on Starter and $0.005 on Professional. Both run on stealth sessions, as the proxies guide and the captcha guide explain, and stealth mode is included on every paid plan.
The two platforms quote CAPTCHA on different bases, per thousand on Steel and per solve on Solari, so a team that solves them in volume should price that line on its own. A team that proxies most of its traffic should compare the per-GB rates, since that line can outgrow the browser hours. With the extras mapped, the remaining question is the core hourly rate on Solari.
What the Same Work Costs on Solari
Solari drops the split between fee and usage: the monthly fee comes back as credits, and every browser draws from them at the plan's hourly rate. The chart below sets the browser-hour rates on both platforms side by side.
The chart carries the Professional and Team rates; below them, the same docs page puts Starter at $0.10 an hour. Starter's $20 fee and Professional's $200 fee each come back as the same amount of credits every month, and Professional allows 150 concurrent browsers with sessions up to 24 hours. Those credits also pay for sandboxes and desktops, so a pipeline that runs code next to its browser stays on one bill.
When the balance reaches zero, new sandboxes and desktops stop launching until the team tops up, and there is no end-of-month overage charge. Existing Playwright or Puppeteer code connects to a Solari session through its CDP endpoint, as the sessions guide shows, so the switch is mostly a change of connection string. That leaves the decision itself.
Choosing the Right Setup
The choice comes down to session length, extras and how much the month varies. Steel's plans suit a team whose jobs fit inside its session limits and who wants an open-source browser behind them; a workload with long sessions, heavy proxy use, or sandboxes and desktops next to its browsers fits an hourly rate drawn from one credit balance. Steel is the open-source vendor with the established developer following; Solari is the younger company and moves faster on speed and price. The introduction to Solari covers the three surfaces behind that single bill.
Get Started With Solari
Start by taking last month's browser hours from the Steel invoice, entering them in the estimator on the Solari pricing page, and running the same job on the Free plan's credits. Solari is about 1.6x cheaper than Steel per browser hour at list price, and the same credits cover a sandbox or desktop when the job needs one. Start free on Solari and see the next invoice follow the hours the fleet actually ran.
