Cloud browser vs your Playwright: price in 2026

Cloud browsers have become the standard way to launch AI agents and parsers that require real Chromium in 2025–2026: Browserbase, Steel, Browserless, and Bright Data's Scraping Browser. You connect via CDP, get a ready session, and don't worry about servers. However, this convenience comes at a cost, and the largest line item is usually not the browser's runtime but traffic through built-in proxies: $6–12 per gigabyte. Let's break down the rates to see how much the same task costs in the cloud versus your own Playwright, and where the line is drawn.

All prices below are taken from the service pricing pages as of October 8, 2026. Rates change, so check them yourself before purchasing.

What Exactly You Pay for in a Cloud Browser

Almost all services have a bill that consists of two resources:

Browser time — session hours or "units" of time.
Traffic through their proxies — gigabytes or units per megabyte.

Additionally, captcha solving and limits on parallel sessions may be added on top of that. The key point is: all four services in our comparison allow you to pay for traffic separately from the browser — either by connecting your own proxies or paying for gigabytes without tying them to time. Therefore, the right question is not "cloud or own," but "what am I overpaying for in the cloud."

Rates of Four Services

Browserbase

Developer — $20 per month: 100 browser hours, 1 GB of proxy, up to 25 parallel sessions. Over the limit: $0.12 per hour and $12 per GB.
Startup — $99 per month: 500 hours, 5 GB of proxy, up to 100 sessions. Over the limit: $0.10 per hour and $10 per GB.
Your proxies can be connected when creating a session (type external, address, and login-password). The service checks the proxy when creating a session: if it is unavailable or the credentials are incorrect, the session will not start.
The built-in proxy counts traffic with a minimum of 1 MB per session; geo — country, state (only USA), or city, on a "best effort" basis: if there is no IP in the desired location, the nearest one will be provided.

Steel

Launch — no subscription fee, one-time $30 credits: $0.10 per browser hour, $10 per GB of residential proxy, $3 for 1000 captchas, up to 10 sessions.
Scale — $250 per month plus usage, $100 credits monthly: $0.08 per hour, $6 per GB, $1 for 1000 captchas, up to 100 sessions.
Without proxies, traffic goes through Steel's datacenter IPs for free. Your proxies (http, https, socks5) can be connected on all plans, including the free one, and Steel charges nothing for them.

Browserless

Payment is in units: one unit — up to 30 seconds of one connection's operation; every additional 30 seconds is another unit, reconnection is considered a new connection.
Prototyping — $25 per month (when paid annually): 20,000 units, up to 10 browsers. Starter — $140: 180,000 units. Scale — $350: 500,000 units. Over the limit — $0.0015–0.0020 per unit.
The built-in residential proxy — 6 units per megabyte, captcha — 10 units per solution. On Starter, this is approximately $4.7 per GB within the package and around $10 per GB at the over-limit price.
Your proxies — only on paid plans (on the free plan, there is a 401 error), via the externalProxyServer parameter or the Chrome flag --proxy-server; units for traffic from your proxies are not deducted. SOCKS5 works only through the flag and without login-password — this is a Chrome limitation.

Bright Data Scraping Browser (Browser API)

A different model: you only pay for gigabytes — $8 per GB without a subscription, or Scale for $499 per month with 71 GB (about $7 per GB), parallel sessions without limits.
The price includes site unlocking, captcha solving, browser fingerprints, and retries. Session time is not charged.
Your proxies cannot be connected here — proxies are the product.

How Much a Page Weighs in the Browser

To compare, we need volume. In our measurement of traffic consumption of Playwright and Puppeteer on 1000 pages, the full page load in Chromium weighed 2.8–4.5 MB, and 1000 pages — 3–4 GB. Blocking images, fonts, and media cuts it by 40–60%, and aggressive blocking of third-party domains brings 1000 pages down to 0.6–1.2 GB. For calculation, let's take round numbers:

3 MB per page — the browser loads everything;
1.2 MB — images, fonts, and media are blocked.

Scenario 1: Parsing 10,000 Pages a Month

Conditions: 10,000 pages, about 20 seconds per page (this is approximately 56 browser hours), residential traffic. Full load — 30 GB, with blocking — 12 GB.

Option	30 GB (load everything)	12 GB (blocking)
Browserbase Startup, their proxy	$99 + 25 GB × $10 = $349	$99 + 7 GB × $10 = $169
Browserbase Startup + residential proxies at $2.70/GB	$99 + $81 = $180	$99 + $32 = $131
Steel Launch, their proxy	$6 + 30 GB × $10 = $306	$6 + $120 = $126
Steel Launch + own proxies	$6 + $81 = $87	$6 + $32 = $38
Browserless Starter, their proxy	10,000 + 180,000 units: $140 + ~$17 = ~$157	10,000 + 72,000 units: $140 (fits within the package)
Browserless Prototyping + own proxies	$25 + $81 = $106	$25 + $32 = $57
Bright Data Scraping Browser	30 × $8 = $240	12 × $8 = $96
Your Playwright + own proxies	$81 + server	$32 + server

The rate of $2.70 per GB is our price for residential proxies billed by gigabyte; substitute your provider's price. In the Bright Data line, remember that captcha and unlocking are already included — in the other lines, captcha solving is paid separately or done by your code.

What can be seen from the table:

Browser time is negligible. 56 hours cost $6 in Steel and are fully included in the Browserbase package. Almost the entire bill is for traffic.
Using your proxies in a cloud browser reduces the bill by 2–3.5 times with the same service if the pages are heavy.
Resource blocking saves more than choosing the service. A single line page.route() to cancel images and fonts makes any option cheaper.
Your Playwright wins on traffic, but it adds server costs, Chromium updates, task queues, and the headache of fingerprints — that's engineer time, not a line in the bill.

Scenario 2: Long Sessions and Multi-Account Management

Here the picture is reversed. Let's take 30 profiles, each working one hour a day, with little traffic — scrolling, messaging, clicks, about 50 MB per profile per day. For a month: 900 browser hours and about 45 GB.

Browserbase Startup: 500 hours in the package + 400 × $0.10 = $40; traffic with your proxies. Total $139 plus proxies.
Steel Launch: 900 × $0.10 = $90 plus proxies.
Browserless: one hour is 120 units, 900 hours is 108,000 units: fits within Starter for $140, plus your proxies. However, the maximum length of one session on Starter is 30 minutes, on Scale — 60: a one-hour profile will need to reconnect, and the code must handle this.
Bright Data Scraping Browser: 45 × $8 = $360, but the service is designed for data collection, not for managing accounts with a constant IP.

For long sessions, the consistency of the address is more important than the price per hour. An account needs the same IP for the entire session and preferably the same one tomorrow. Built-in proxies of cloud browsers often provide a new address for each session (in Steel, this behavior is default: a new US-IP for each session). For social networks and ad accounts, it makes more sense to connect your mobile proxies with IP rotation by timer or on demand and keep the profile on sticky sessions. And if accounts live in anti-detect rather than in the cloud, it’s useful to compare whose proxies are more cost-effective — built-in anti-detect or your own: the same logic applies.

When a Cloud Browser is Justified

AI agents and spikes in load. Need to spin up 50 browsers for 10 minutes and then shut them down — the cloud does this in seconds, while your cluster sits idle the rest of the time.
No infrastructure. A team of one developer, no one to update Chromium on the server.
Heavy protection on targets. If you can't avoid captcha and unlocking, Bright Data at $8 per GB with included unlocking may turn out to be cheaper than your own combination of proxies, solvers, and retries. We calculated where the boundary lies for response weight in the comparison of proxies, Web Unblocker, and Scraping API.

When Your Own Playwright is More Cost-Effective

Stable volume — tens of thousands of pages every day. The server pays for itself, and traffic costs exactly the price of the proxies.
Control over fingerprints. In the cloud, you depend on how the service collects Chromium; in your own stack, you can use Camoufox, Patchright, or any other stealth browser.
Data cannot be released externally — internal systems, client personal accounts, compliance requirements.
Specific geo is needed — city or telecom operator. "Best effort" geo of built-in proxies may provide a neighboring region.

Practical Scheme for 2026

Calculate the weight of a page on your target: run 20–50 pages and check the traffic in DevTools or in the proxy logs.
Enable blocking of images, fonts, and media and recalculate — often the weight drops by half.
If you are using a cloud browser — immediately check if your proxies can be connected on your plan (with Browserless — only on paid plans) and with which protocol.
Connect your proxies with login-password authentication via HTTP: SOCKS5 with login is not supported by Chrome, this is a browser limitation, not a service limitation.
Leave built-in cloud proxies only for rare targets and geos where your addresses are not available — this way, built-in traffic at $10 per GB won't become the main expense item.

Conclusion

A cloud browser sells two resources, and they cost very differently: an hour of Chromium costs $0.08–0.12, while a gigabyte of their proxies costs $6–12. When parsing heavy pages, traffic is the main part of the bill (in our calculation for Steel with built-in proxies — over 95%), so the cheapest way is almost always a hybrid: a cloud browser for convenience and scalability plus your proxies with payment per gigabyte and blocking unnecessary resources. Your Playwright wins on steady large volume and where full control over fingerprints and geo is needed. The "all-inclusive" price per gigabyte is justified only when the target truly does not allow access without unlocking and captcha.