frontpage.
newsnewestaskshowjobs

Made with ♥ by @iamnishanth

Open Source @Github

fp.

Open in hackernews

Launch HN: Simplex (YC S24) – Browser automation platform for developers

https://www.simplex.sh/
12•marcon680•1h ago
Hi HN! We’re Marco and Shreya, founders of Simplex (https://www.simplex.sh/). We’re building all the infrastructure you need for modern browser automation – including remote browsers, steerable web agents, and more.

Here’s a demo: https://youtu.be/7KpWJbOcm1Y

We’re excited to be posting on HN again! Back in January, we Show HN’d the earliest version of Simplex (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=42704160). We’ve now spent close to a year working with real customers, forward-deploying into their codebases, and building web agent systems for them from the ground up to understand what it takes to get agents working in production.

We built Simplex because we started seeing a pattern: companies would initially roll their own Playwright/Stagehand web automation solutions. This worked fine in the early prototype stages, but they’d quickly get overwhelmed with technical challenges as they productionized automations across all the websites their customers use.

As they scaled, they’d have to build and manage:

- Chrome infrastructure: managing remote browsers, extensions, browser settings for anti-bot detection/stealth

- DOM parsing: we’ve seen many web portals have really weird quirks (nested iframes, shadow DOM elements, dynamic loading, popups, unstable selectors, etc..) that are hard to parse with traditional/existing browser agents.

- Agent context engineering: Website state, user prompts, system prompts, past actions all take up a massive amount of context. Without managing this, agents can get caught in loops or take wrong actions. - Caching/Reliability: No matter how perfect your prompts are, it’s hard to guarantee consistency without caching/deterministic actions. - Login/2fa: Solve captcha, fetch 2FA from email/text/Google Auth, encrypt/decrypt credentials to access portals blocked by login. - Automation management: You’ll have to store all your prompts, scrapers, and agents, and find a way to make them reusable if you have the same workflows across different portals - User interface: Creating new workflows + debugging can take time. You’ll have to find easy ways to expose this to your engineers to make the process more efficient when you have hundreds of automations to build.

Simplex is a proper solution that handles all of the above for you. We offer both an UI/dashboard (which is what we use even as technical developers) and an extensive API for customers who are using Simplex in their existing AI agents. Our dashboard/API docs are here: https://simplex.sh/docs. We’d love for you to check them out!

You can get started for free with Simplex at (https://www.simplex.sh/) (you have to register to prevent abuse since we’re giving you a remote browser that connects to the internet).

Our first users have been AI companies across different industries like accounting, logistics/transportation, customer service, and healthtech. We’ve seen them:

- Fill out prior authorization forms on medical provider portals - Download hundreds of PDFs from grocer portals across the US - Automate and scrape structured data from traditional ERPs like NetSuite - Submit bids/shipments on logistics/TMS portals - Scrape lawyer/doctor license information across public government portals - And more!

We’re excited to see more use cases as we open up the platform – this is our first time doing self-serve.

Wanted to end with a quick thank you to HN. The feedback on our first Show HN gave us confidence to steer our product in this direction, and has deeply shaped the last year of our lives. We’d love feedback, especially from anyone who’s tried solving this problem or built similar tools.

Happy to answer questions and looking forward to your comments!

Comments

jmpavlec•1h ago
Looks nice but that's a pretty steep increase from free trial to the lowest tier of 2500/month. Is there really nothing in between? Like a pay as you use plan?
marcon680•38m ago
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.

themanmaran•57m ago
The Coupa portal is an amazing example because I've had to personally spend ~10+ hours clicking that new invoice button and retyping the exact same info.

If you want to set up monthly billing in Coupa, you just manually create 12 invoices and schedule them out. Each time you have to retype all the account information from scratch, and there are a few landmine buttons on the page that will clear all the forms and make you start from scratch. I can't imagine the thousands of human hours lost every year to just filling out fields in Coupa.

marcon680•34m ago
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. :)
myflash13•34m ago
What about hybrid automations or human-in-the-loop flows? We have automations where the human starts by logging in, then hands over to the agent. Some parts may even be Puppeteer automated. This also means the session may be long running, typically for months at a time and the agent needs to notify the human again if they get logged out. None of the existing browser automation platforms I have tried make this easy or cost effective, so we are currently trying to build our own. Would love to consider Simplex if this is solved.
marcon680•22m ago
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.

Jayakumark•17m ago
What models are used ? and whether user data is used to train ? Not seeing privacy policy or TOS page.
marcon680•16m ago
Good questions! Will add these and put a data processors page tonight. We use Anthropic/OpenAI models.
m_w_•15m ago
Homepage layout horizontally overflows <1000-ishpx wide to when it switches to mobile layout. Cool concept though.
marcon680•9m ago
Will fix, thanks for flagging!
tnolet•8m ago
How are you different from Browserbase?
qafy•35s ago
Playing devils advocate here, why use AI to perform flows that could be easily accomplished with a selenium script? Libraries like testing-library provide great interfaces for semantic and robust DOM selectors. Putting an AI in the loop seems like an extremely expensive and slow way to intervene with relatively simple automation.

I can totally see the value of agent driven flows for automating flows that are highly dynamic, poorly specified, error prone, zero shot environments, etc, but that doesn't seem to be at all what you are demonstrating here.

As someone who has spent a LOT of my time in my career working on browser automation and testing, speed and cost was always key. Even with existing programmatic tools like selenium, playwright, cypress, etc speed and headfull hosting costs were already big issues. This seems orders of magnitude slower and more expensive. Curious how you pitch this to potential customers.

What Cloudflare Launched in Birthday Week 2025

https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLI6HzeeCy4S_YNpiWer9uOHIuSWxmCIhh
1•emot•1m ago•1 comments

Modern Tools Are Worse

https://gomakethings.com/modern-tools-are-worse/
1•ulrischa•1m ago•0 comments

Founding Engineer (SF and NY)

1•jake-salomon•2m ago•0 comments

Mixologician: Drinking with Datalog

https://ianthehenry.com/posts/drinking-with-datalog/
1•fanf2•4m ago•0 comments

I Shipped 2 Months of Features in 3 Weeks with LLM Agents

https://m33.notion.site/How-I-Shipped-2-Months-of-Features-in-3-Weeks-With-LLM-Agents-and-What-It...
1•qpleple•8m ago•0 comments

Photonic Switches Promise to Keep GPUs Fed, Cool

https://www.hpcwire.com/2025/10/01/photonic-switches-promise-to-keep-gpus-fed-cool/
1•rbanffy•8m ago•0 comments

GPT-5 Oracle

https://ampcode.com/news/gpt-5-oracle
2•tosh•9m ago•0 comments

OpenAI Valuation Reaches $500B, Topping Musk's SpaceX

https://www.bloomberg.com/news/articles/2025-10-02/openai-completes-share-sale-at-record-500-bill...
3•toomanyrichies•16m ago•1 comments

The Internet Is Better on Comet

https://www.perplexity.ai/hub/blog/comet-is-now-available-to-everyone-worldwide
1•alvis•18m ago•0 comments

PitchRaft – Heatmaps and Analytics for Pitch Decks

https://pitchraft.com/
1•eminfaliyev1991•18m ago•0 comments

The Shadow of Desire: Painting the Origins of Art (Ca. 1625–1850)

https://publicdomainreview.org/collection/origins-of-painting/
1•prismatic•20m ago•0 comments

Slow down and protect things: Fed independence and the Supreme Court

https://stayathomemacro.substack.com/p/slow-down-and-protect-things-fed
1•rbanffy•20m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Term – Data validation that runs anywhere, no infrastructure needed

https://github.com/withterm/term
1•ericpsimon•20m ago•0 comments

Ask HN: What's the Deal with Plastic Guns?

1•phoenixhaber•21m ago•3 comments

Should I Switch from Git to Jujutsu

https://etodd.io/2025/10/02/should-i-switch-from-git-to-jujutsu/
2•et1337•22m ago•0 comments

Arm Says Neoverse Is a More Universal Compute Substrate Than x86

https://www.nextplatform.com/2025/10/01/arm-says-neoverse-is-a-more-universal-compute-substrate-t...
2•rbanffy•23m ago•0 comments

RenderScholar – Scrape real papers from Google Scholar (no hallucinations)

https://github.com/peterdunson/renderscholar
1•peterdunson•24m ago•1 comments

Hacktoberfest 2025

https://hacktoberfest.com
1•harshitgargmnit•25m ago•0 comments

Subpoena tracking platform blames outage on AWS social engineering attack

https://www.theregister.com/2025/10/02/subpoena_tracking_platform_outage_blamed/
1•rntn•26m ago•0 comments

ClickHouse 25.9

https://clickhouse.com/blog/clickhouse-release-25-09
1•tosh•27m ago•0 comments

Infinite Git Repos on Cloudflare Workers

https://www.gitlip.com/blog/infinite-git-repos-on-cloudflare-workers
1•jcbhmr•27m ago•0 comments

JavaScript or Rock Band?

https://js-rocks.agical.se/
1•agge•28m ago•0 comments

Sycophantic AI increases attitude extremity and overconfidence

https://osf.io/preprints/psyarxiv/vmyek_v1
1•JnBrymn•32m ago•0 comments

Comparing a RISC and a CISC with Similar Hardware Organization

https://dl.acm.org/doi/pdf/10.1145/106972.107003
2•luu•33m ago•0 comments

Indefinite Backpack Travel

https://jeremymaluf.com/onebag/
2•renjieliu•34m ago•1 comments

Wikidata: Embedding Project (Officially Launched)

https://www.wikidata.org/wiki/Wikidata:Embedding_Project
1•jackdoe•35m ago•0 comments

How to live to 117? Researchers find clues in the oldest woman

https://www.washingtonpost.com/wellness/2025/10/01/maria-branyas-morera/
1•sonabinu•37m ago•0 comments

Show HN: Tools in One Chrome Extension

https://superdevpro.com/
1•mddanishyusuf•38m ago•0 comments

When Asked about Reading

https://allthatjazz.me/posts/when-asked-about-reading
1•saeedesmaili•38m ago•0 comments

Mamdani Says He Would Phase Out NYC Gifted Program for Early Grades

https://www.nytimes.com/2025/10/02/nyregion/mamdani-schools-gifted-and-talented-program.html
4•JumpCrisscross•40m ago•1 comments