BU pricing guide details
Pricing Overview
BU (Browser Use) prices on consumption with no subscription layer underneath it. You start free, then buy prepaid credits from $5, and those credits do not expire. There is no seat count, no monthly platform fee, and no annual commitment gating access to the product — an unusual structure in a category where most agent platforms sell a monthly workspace subscription with a credit allowance attached.
The bill has three independent meters:
- Browser time — $0.02 per hour of browser runtime.
- Internet traffic — billed separately from browser time, at $5 per GB on high-quality residential proxies or $0.20 per GB on a direct connection or your own proxy. Proxies are on by default.
- Agent model usage — Browser Use Agents are billed at model cost + 20%.
The practical consequence is that browser time is almost never the expensive part. At $0.02 per hour, a browser running continuously for a 730-hour month costs $14.60. The variables that actually move the invoice are traffic — where the residential-proxy rate is 25× the direct rate — and model spend, which BU passes through with a 20% margin.
An Enterprise tier exists with custom concurrency, custom SLAs, a custom data policy, HIPAA support, and zero data retention. BU does not publish a price for it; it requires a custom quote.
Plan Comparison
| Plan | Price | What the data states |
|---|---|---|
| Free start | $0 | Start free, pay as you go |
| Credits (pay as you go) | From $5 | Prepaid credits, no subscription, no expiry |
| Browser runtime | $0.02 / hour | Plus internet traffic |
| Traffic — residential proxy | $5 / GB | High-quality residential proxies; proxies on by default |
| Traffic — direct or BYO proxy | $0.20 / GB | Direct connection or bring-your-own proxy |
| Browser Use Agents | Model cost + 20% | Plus browser time and traffic |
| Enterprise | Custom quote | Custom concurrency, custom SLAs, custom data policy, HIPAA support, zero data retention |
BU also publishes separate references for model prices, concurrency limits, billing details, and a custom model API. Specific concurrency ceilings per credit balance are not stated in the data we hold.
Hidden Costs and Considerations
Proxies are on by default. This is the single most important line item to check before you scale. The default path bills traffic at $5 per GB; switching to a direct connection or your own proxy bills at $0.20 per GB. That is a 25× difference on a meter you may not be watching, because it is billed separately from the browser-hour rate that dominates the marketing copy. If your targets do not require residential IPs, the default setting is costing you 25 times the direct rate. If they do — anti-bot-protected commerce sites, geo-restricted content, sites that block datacenter ranges — the residential rate is the cost of the job working at all, not an optional upgrade.
Traffic volume is hard to predict from task count. Browser automation traffic depends on page weight, not on how many tasks you run. A workflow that loads image-heavy pages, video, or ad-laden marketplaces will consume dramatically more GB per task than one hitting a lean internal admin panel. We would strongly advise measuring GB-per-task on your real targets during the free tier before modelling any monthly figure.
The 20% model markup compounds with retries. Agents that retry, re-plan, or loop on a failing selector consume tokens each attempt, and every token carries the markup. Verbose reasoning models and large screenshot payloads push this meter hardest. If you already hold model API contracts, the custom model API is worth investigating as a way to route model spend outside the markup — though the data we hold does not state whether that changes the 20% treatment.
Prepaid credits are a working-capital question, not a cost. Credits do not expire, so unused balance is not lost, but it is cash out the door ahead of usage. For teams with procurement processes that dislike prepaid balances, that is a process friction rather than a price problem.
Costs BU does not charge that you will still pay. Engineering time to build and maintain the automations, observability and alerting for failed runs, and storage for any artifacts you extract all sit outside this pricing. For usage-based agent platforms generally, the operational cost of keeping brittle automations working typically exceeds the platform bill.
Cost Estimates by Team Size
These are our scenarios, not BU quotes. Each row shows the unit rate and the quantity we assumed so you can substitute your own numbers.
| Scenario | Browser time | Traffic | Model | Monthly total |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Single developer evaluating | 50 hrs × $0.02/hr = $1.00 | 5 GB × $5/GB residential = $25.00 | $50 model cost + 20% = $60.00 | $86.00 |
| Same developer, BYO proxy | 50 hrs × $0.02/hr = $1.00 | 5 GB × $0.20/GB direct = $1.00 | $50 model cost + 20% = $60.00 | $62.00 |
| Small team, production workflows | 500 hrs × $0.02/hr = $10.00 | 50 GB × $5/GB residential = $250.00 | $500 model cost + 20% = $600.00 | $860.00 |
| Same team, BYO proxy | 500 hrs × $0.02/hr = $10.00 | 50 GB × $0.20/GB direct = $10.00 | $500 model cost + 20% = $600.00 | $620.00 |
| High-volume extraction | 5,000 hrs × $0.02/hr = $100.00 | 500 GB × $5/GB residential = $2,500.00 | $2,000 model cost + 20% = $2,400.00 | $5,000.00 |
| Same volume, BYO proxy | 5,000 hrs × $0.02/hr = $100.00 | 500 GB × $0.20/GB direct = $100.00 | $2,000 model cost + 20% = $2,400.00 | $2,600.00 |
Note what these rows show: browser time is 2% or less of every total. The residential-vs-direct proxy decision swings the high-volume case by $2,400 per month on identical work.
How BU Pricing Compares
| Tool | Pricing Model | Starting Price | Best For |
|---|---|---|---|
| BU | Usage-based, prepaid credits | Credits from $5; browsers $0.02/hour | Browser automation where you want to pay only for runtime and traffic actually consumed |
| Dify | Open source + subscription | Sandbox $0 (200 message credits, 1 workspace, 1 member, 5 apps, 50MB knowledge storage); Professional $59/month per workspace | Teams wanting a predictable per-workspace subscription with a defined credit allowance |
| CrewAI | Freemium, per-execution | Free tier 50 executions/month; additional executions $0.50 each; Enterprise custom | Multi-agent orchestration where work divides cleanly into discrete executions |
| Flowise | Freemium / self-hosted | Self-hosted free (MIT license); Cloud Free $0/month (2 flows and assistants, 100 predictions/month, 5MB storage); paid cloud tier price not published here | Teams willing to self-host to eliminate platform fees entirely |
The structural difference matters more than the headline numbers. Dify and Flowise sell capacity in advance and meter you against an allowance; CrewAI charges per execution at $0.50 once past 50 free runs. BU charges for three resources you can measure directly. If your workloads are bursty, BU's model is genuinely cheaper — idle costs nothing and credits do not expire. If your workloads are steady and heavy on page weight, a subscription with a known ceiling gives you a forecastable number that BU's traffic meter will not.
Our recommendation: run a two-week measurement on the free tier, record GB-per-task and tokens-per-task on your actual targets, and decide the proxy setting deliberately before you commit meaningful credit. The default is the expensive one.