Based on the feedback in this thread we're going to be releasing an updated version that focuses more around tooling for the browser agents themselves as opposed to scaling/scheduling, so stay tuned for that!
We're in the middle of putting this together right now but it's going to be a wrapper around Google Secret Manager for those that don't want to set up a secrets manager themselves.
Depends on the use case. Lots of hospitals and banks use RPA to automate routine processes on their EHRs and systems of record, because these kinds of software typically don't have APIs available. Or if they do, they're very limited.
Playwright and other browser automation scripts are a much more powerful version of RPA but they do require some knowledge of code. But there are more and more developers every year and code just gets more powerful every year. So I think it's a good bet to make that browser automation in code will replace RPA altogether some day.
There are quite a few open source YC startups at this point. Our understanding is that:
1. Developer tooling should be open source by default
2. Open source doesn't meaningfully affect revenue/scaling because developers that would use your self-hosted version would build in-house anyway.
Looking at their docs, it seems that with Browserbase you would still have to deploy your Playwright script to a long-running job and manage the infra around that yourself.
Our approach is a bit different. With finic you just write the script. We handle the entire job deployment and scaling on our end.
We currently don't save the browser state after the run has completed but that's something we can definitely add as a feature. Could you elaborate on your use case? In which scenarios would it be better to split a run into multiple steps?
I spent some time building legacy software integrations while contracting for startups, so I wrote this guide for developers in the same boat. It covers user-permissioned authentication, the trade-offs between RPA and reverse-engineering APIs, and how to deploy your integration to production.