29 ms·

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

54 points by marcon680 1y ago

Hi HN! We’re Marco and Shreya, founders of Simplex (https://www.simplex.sh/ 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 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 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: You'll need remote browsers, extension support, browser settings for anti-bot detection/stealth, and a hundred more small fixes. - 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 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/ 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!

jmpavlec 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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. :)
_1tem 1y 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.

54 points by marcon680 1y ago

jmpavlec 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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 1y 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. :)

_1tem 1y 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.