Steel
the agent browser you can actually run yourself
the only genuinely self-hostable browser platform here, Apache-2.0 and running in docker — with every resource drawing from one credit pool that makes forecasting a modelling exercise.
Steel is open source under Apache-2.0 with 7,521 stars and a push two days before we checked, and it self-hosts via docker. that matters more than it sounds in a category where Browserbase is cloud-only and Hyperbrowser publishes no repo at all: if the hosted economics stop working, or the data cannot leave your infrastructure, you have somewhere to go. Firecrawl is the only other self-hostable option here and its AGPL licence is far more restrictive than Steel's Apache-2.0.
the hosted pricing is honest about being usage-based. there is no monthly minimum on the Launch tier — $0.10 a browser-hour billed by the minute and rounded up, plus $30 of credits to start — and the $250 Scale plan buys better rates across the board along with 100 concurrent sessions.
the description above is ours, condensed from the ranking. pricing moves — check it on the vendor's own page before you rely on it.
- category
- web scraping apis
- pricing
- $0.10 / browser-hour pay-as-you-go
- website
- steel.dev
the only genuinely self-hostable browser platform here, Apache-2.0 and running in docker — with every resource drawing from one credit pool that makes forecasting a modelling exercise.
we researched this category against vendors' own pricing pages and licence files. that is where this line comes from — not from the vendor, and not from anything they paid for.