Steel Browser

Steel Browser is browser infrastructure for AI agents: a Chrome instance behind an API that an agent drives, with sessions that keep cookies and local storage alive between requests. It is the self-hosted answer to paying by the browser hour, and it is Apache-2.0.

Docker is the fast path, and it also deploys to Railway or Render or runs on bare Node with Chrome. Control is Puppeteer and CDP, so everything you already know about driving Chrome still applies. What it saves you is assembly: stealth plugins and fingerprint management, proxy chain support for IP rotation, Chrome extension loading, and endpoints that turn a page straight into markdown, a screenshot, or a PDF.

Solo developers and small teams building agents that browse: self-host it and the marginal cost of a session becomes your own compute. Medium teams: still self-host, but budget real operational time, because headless Chrome at concurrency is memory hungry and crashed sessions are normal rather than exceptional. Large teams running a fleet: compare honestly against Steel Cloud or Browserbase, because managed browser services exist precisely because scaling this is miserable.

The catch: releases are still tagged beta and arrive months apart even though commits keep landing. The bigger one is that self-hosting means you personally own the anti-bot arms race. The stealth plugins are in the box, but keeping them effective against sites that actively fight automation is continuous work, and absorbing that work is most of what the hosted providers are actually charging for.