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marcon680
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- We have paying customers in production at the Growth and Enterprise plans :)
- We've generally seen the "easy" flows not actually be easy. Workflows that have complex branching logic (shown when filling out the Aetna form in the first example in the video), structured scraping (the second example we showed in the video), and login/2FA/intelligent multi-agent scraping (shown in the last example in the video), are all things that are difficult to impossible to do with traditional automation libraries.
We also have an example of a complex, multi-agent workflow here that might be useful for you to look at: https://www.simplex.sh/blog/context-engineering-for-web-agen...
- Yep we actually cache flows after first run! This makes flows that are closer to traditional RPA pretty much the same as using Playwright/Puppeteer.
- From my understanding, Browserbase mostly provides remote browsers for their users. We also provide remote browsers, but with a lot more infrastructure on top (single/multi web agents, caching/reliability support, an agentic IDE/editor, etc).
- Will fix, thanks for flagging!
- Good questions! Will add these and put a data processors page tonight. We use Anthropic/OpenAI models.
- Could I ask why the flow starts with a human logging in? Is it because you're using their credentials and/or have some sensitivity around storing their credentials? Or is it something to do with 2FA (we handle 2FA)? Or are you just storing the session data after they log in so you can re-use it for those few months you mentioned?
Re: Puppeteer automation as part of the script -- we have a feature we wrote for one of our customers that we didn't promote to production where you can define a deterministic action in the dashboard that allows you to paste in JavaScript, but we're likely not to push that to prod anytime soon. Could you explain your reasoning for wanting to use Puppeteer still? We've generally seen customers fully switch over to Simplex instead of relying on their original Puppeteer/Playwright scripts -- since we have action caching, the underlying script (click on div locator with this div id, etc.) is pretty similar to what you'd get using Playwright.
- Yes, it's a huge pain from what we've seen. That portal is actually running in production for some of our AR/AP AI customers, and getting browser agents to properly parse that page was difficult -- Coupa injects all the DOM elements through a JavaScript <script/> tag like 2-5 seconds after the page loads, non-deterministically. :)
- Currently no, it's just the three options (free vs. $2500/month vs. larger enterprise plans). We do usually offer 2-3 month ramp up periods for the $2500/month plans that are usage based.
To be transparent, we're an early startup, and a big part of that is user validation. We've been lucky to have companies as small as 5 people sign onto our $2500/month plan -- it shows some commitment on their side and helps us understand whether it's a real problem for our users. That's the same reason the $2500/month plan isn't self serve (you have to talk to us first).
We're definitely thinking of adding a pay as you go plan! But we aren't there yet re: our understanding of the market, if that makes sense.
- 2 points
- Some of the things we're trying to differently are 1) making flows deterministic by using vision models that have a consistent output given an image and an input query and 2) breaking up flows into these smaller atomic actions in order to improve consistency as well.
RE: workflows w/ complex forms and tabs -- do you have some sites that are good examples of this? We'd love to see how Simplex does.
- Thanks John! We should make that more clear in the docs. You can set browser=None on initialization and Simplex will create a local browser instance that can run on your local websites. We're not planning to be open source right now since a large portion of our product is custom vision models + inference speedups through hosting.
Browser Use is another YC company. Probably the biggest difference is that they're more agent focused while we're more lower level -- in the Claude Computer Use camp like you mentioned.
- Thanks! We're happy to add more REST API functionality -- could you email us at founders@simplex.sh if you're up to talk further about what you'd like to see? RE: pricing, we're still figuring this out!
- Yeah sure! We mentioned a little bit in the post that we stumbled upon this problem when working on a synthetic data contract. Internally, we were building software at the time to fully automate the process of creating synthetic data, all the way from purchasing assets to building scene layouts to rendering images. We realized after 2 months of building that there wasn't a great need for this problem nor could we build something minimal but feature-complete that we could give to people and iterate off of. We also saw the writing on the wall re: building 3D world models (see WorldLabs and NVIDIA's new 3D world models). We're excited to see where this goes!
- So sorry about this, it looks like our servers went down overnight. Just fixed, should be good now!
- We finetune our own VLMs for this -- unfortunately prefer not to share which ones we use specifically! ClickClickClick looks awesome, have you heard of FerretUI (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2404.05719)? Pretty similar idea.
- Yep, any websocket URL works. I see that Browserless offers a websocket URL, so you can use them! You just need to pass in a Playwright browser object into the Simplex constructor.
- Yep, we also run all our python code in sandboxes and a few other security measures!
Site loading is pretty now slow due to a combination of 1. traffic we're currently getting, 2. running a remote session, 3. running a few large vision language models, and 4. adding waits to allow pages to load/allow you to view your search results. We're working on cutting our latency significantly since it leads to a better development experience.
We gate full access to the platform partially for this reason. We debated giving fewer than 50 free browser sessions, for example, and have already banned a few accounts from our self-serve today that were unidentifiable/"company accounts" without a legitimate web presence.