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Show HN: An API for human-powered browser tasks

https://browser-work.com/
5•madebywelch•1d ago
At APM Help, we have a large team that performs repetitive, browser-based tasks. Years ago, to manage this work securely and get a clear audit trail, we built an internal platform we call "Hub." It's essentially a locked-down environment where our team works that records their sessions, tracks every interaction, and prevents data from being copied or shared. It's been our internal source of truth for years.

More recently, like many companies, we've been building more automation. And like everyone else, we've seen our automations fail on edge cases—a weirdly formatted invoice our parser can't read, a website layout change that breaks a scraper, etc. Our team would have to manually step in to fix these.

We realized other developers must have this exact same problem, but without a 250-person team on standby. So we connected our old, battle-tested Hub to a new, modern front door: a Human-in-the-Loop (HITL) API. We're calling it browser-work.com.

The idea is simple: when you hit a task that needs a human, you can send it to our team through the API.

Here's how it works:

  - You POST a request to our endpoint. The payload contains the context for the task (like a URL) and a set of instructions for the human on what to do.
  - The task appears in the Hub, where one of our trained operators can claim it.
  - They perform the task exactly as instructed, all within the secure Hub environment.
  - When they're done, we send a webhook to your system. The return payload includes the task's output, any notes left by the human, and a detailed log of their actions (e.g., DOM elements they interacted with).
For example, if your automation for paying a utility bill fails, you can pass the task to us. A person will log in, navigate the portal, make the payment, and return a confirmation number.

The product is live and we're looking for people with interesting use cases.

I'm Robert, the CIO. If this sounds useful to you, send me a brief email about your use case at robert@apmhelp.com and we can get you started right away.

Happy to answer any questions here.

Comments

taylorhou•1d ago
to add to the post, our humans are all over the world but we have folks in the States, Latam, Philippines, and other SE Asian countries. they primarily do accounting/bookkeeping tasks today (for us at APM Help which I'm the founder).
ada1981•11h ago
And you gaurentee security ie, sending you payment info?

I’d love to try this out as a tool in an intelligent agent flow, and give it the ability to just hire a human and see how it utilizes this.

madebywelch•10h ago
Yes, and a large portion of our workforce has been with us for many, many years. Some even recently celebrating their 7th year anniversary. Their day-to-day right now involves handling sensitive information, like login credentials and PII.

The same operators that would be completing your tasks are the ones we trust and have trained to complete our own internal tasks.

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