Cypress

Cypress runs end-to-end tests in a real browser with a UI that shows you each step as it happens. No Selenium, no driver headaches. You write JavaScript, it clicks things, you watch it happen live. MIT licensed. The open source version gives you a full test runner, time-travel debugging (step backward through your test), automatic waiting, and screenshot/video capture on failure. That's enough for most solo devs and small teams.

Cypress Cloud is where the money comes from. $67/mo for up to 500 test results, scaling to $250/mo and beyond. Cloud gives you parallelization across machines, flake detection, test analytics, and a dashboard to track trends. The parallelization alone can cut a 60-minute suite to 10 minutes.

Solo or small team: free tier handles it. Once your test suite grows past 500 runs per month or you need CI parallelization, you're paying. At $67/mo for a small team, that's reasonable. A flaky test suite wastes more engineering hours than that.

The catch: Cypress only tests what runs in a browser. No native mobile, no multi-tab testing. And the free tier's 500 test results per month disappears fast with any real CI pipeline.