I was reading the blog post about bot detection with browsers. The first layer being the IP address of the browser.
One rather unique scenario I've been trying to work out for a scraper is eliminating network latency. My use of the site is enhanced by the request from the browser having the lowest RTT latency to the webserver as possible. This means being in the same cloud provider.
To do this right now I manually navigate to the site and have a browser extension that clicks at just the right time.
I'd really like to eliminate that manual navigation but every time I've tried adding browser automation outside of the single click from the extension, I'm immediately met with bot detection.
Obviously adding a residential proxy step completely defeats the purpose of the RTT latency optimization.
Do modified browsers drive the overall bot detection heuristic low enough that the cloud IP address itself isn't a red flag? I've seen Camoufox and will try it at some point. What other options are available to drive down the overall "score" so I can still automate the browser but keep the latency low?
Biggest question I have is how this will overcome sites that implement aggressive anti-automation security. I can easily automate websites with existing tools until I slam into that wall.
This never made it into prod since the scale was small, but one of the favorite leaks I found when working on bot detection was browsers which generated the same random numbers. Presumably because they were being init to the same VM snapshot and therefore the same random number state.
So far its cost me $2.27 to submit a contact form 3 times - why is this better than a captcha solver with human solves at 1000 per $2?
On your automation, your tool fed back to me as follows after 3 submissions:
> The CAPTCHA is persistently blocking now — Prosopo's widget appears to have flagged the session/IP due to the repeated submissions. The checkbox won't reset this time. This is expected behavior from their bot protection product. To submit again, you'd likely need to wait a while for the rate limit to clear, or submit manually from your own browser.
The cost is AI cost for using the agent - not captcha cost. Usually, you would write the project and then call it via API - instead of asking the agent to do the action more than 1 time. Considering using the web task API for this use case.
Congrats on launch. I have experienced these issues first hand with `Open Finance` a few years ago.
I feel that you'll end up being an automation agency (you mentioned UiPath), companies who have the skills and capacity to build, will not need your service. But those who want the full service, you might fill a gap.
I'm always genuinely curious on how startups navigate the founder maze as it helps to break the myth of an overnight success story.
Based on your YC page, you went through a couple of pivots over the last years:
- 4 years ago: Intuned - The data assistant for engineering leaders [0]
- 2 years ago: Intuned - The browser automation platform for developers and product teams [1]
- 1 year ago: Intuned Auth Sessions - Build authenticated scrapers and RPA [2]
What was kind of the evolution from YC S22 4 years ago till you arrived at today's launch? How did you find your differentiation in a highly commoditized space? Even within YC, there are many competitors like Firecrawl, Reworkd, BrowserUse, NotteLabs, Browserbase, etc.
Another thing that might interest HN: AI crawlers come with negative side effects for website owners (costs, downtime, etc.), as repeatedly reported here on HN (and experienced myself).
Does Intuned respect robots.txt directives and do you disclose the identity of your crawlers via user-agent header?
We actually went through 1 hard pivot only, the reset is more about framing the problem as we dug deeper and understood the customers and issue more. As an example, "Intuned Auth Sessions" is just a feature that we still support today!
But you are right, being a founder is not easy and the hardest part is figuring out what to build, does it make sense to keep going or should you stop - those are questions I still struggle with until today.
For your question about how is this different - I think if you dig into those product you will see that our focus is different, many of the companies mentioned are focused on powering agents via APIs, some are focused on enabling users to use AI at runtime, we do feel that our product is somewhat differentiated - the closest one is possibly Reworkd and I would still say the product is somewhat different. Now, the hardest part is actually commenting this with customers and the market in general - and there, we have a lot to figure out!
For robots.txt and user-agents question, we think of ourselves as providing infrastructure and flexibility for our customers to do what they want - we do encourage in our docs that they respect robots.txt but we don't enforce it on a platform level.
Appreciate you taking the time to leave this comment - very thoughtful
If you think about "price", "speed" and "accuracy (reliability/quality)", our bet is that models won't hit those 3 together. So you won't get a model that is very fast, very cheap and very accurate anytime soon.
Also, imagine that you have a case where you want to scrape 10,000 records from a website, why have AI navigate to every page to do this? why not write the code, run it, and get consistent and fast result? its also predictable, if it messes up, you know what happened and you can trace it to the exact line of code.
our product is infra + agent. You can use codex or other agent to generate the code. We actually have a cli that allows you to deploy projects to our infrastructure.
We are actually working on open sourcing a plugin that you can use with any coding harness!
definitely came up multiple times. Next week, we are releasing our codex/claude plugin, so you will be able to use codex to create the projects and deploy them to Intuned.
Intuned as a platform to deploy browser automation adds a lot - anti-bot detection, jobs, observability and more.
other than the stuff I mentioned, it’s the deep integration between the agent and platform. Because we have obserabiltity, you can open a failed run, and with a click of a button fix it.
you can also enable self healing on a project which puts it on autopilot. we have a lot to improve on but if you have 10+ active scrapes, intuned as a package saves users time and pain.
Yes, we we did our YC and social launches, we had few companies sign up and we have been building with them sense. For some of them, we have enabled them to run 1000+ scrapers which would have been very hard without Intuned. Some of these have been with us for 2+ years!
What our users love is the agent and the idea that we are not using AI at runtime which improves reliability.
this is not meant as personal assistant to do a task like this - the idea is that if you want to build a travel assistant and you want to do an integration with a travel booking service using browser automation - you can use Intuned to build this integration and expose an API to do search and one to do a booking, etc.
Does this make sense?
We actually do support CDP directly as well. As for why playwright, playwright provides a lot of benefits that we like in terms of being code - like auto-waiting, good syntax for a lot of operations, agents can use playwright pretty well and playwright is generally like by the community we target.
If a customer, doesn't want to use playwright, they don't have to given CDP but we most of our templates use playwright.
Really cool!
I was reading the blog post about bot detection with browsers. The first layer being the IP address of the browser.
One rather unique scenario I've been trying to work out for a scraper is eliminating network latency. My use of the site is enhanced by the request from the browser having the lowest RTT latency to the webserver as possible. This means being in the same cloud provider.
To do this right now I manually navigate to the site and have a browser extension that clicks at just the right time.
I'd really like to eliminate that manual navigation but every time I've tried adding browser automation outside of the single click from the extension, I'm immediately met with bot detection.
Obviously adding a residential proxy step completely defeats the purpose of the RTT latency optimization.
Do modified browsers drive the overall bot detection heuristic low enough that the cloud IP address itself isn't a red flag? I've seen Camoufox and will try it at some point. What other options are available to drive down the overall "score" so I can still automate the browser but keep the latency low?
Biggest question I have is how this will overcome sites that implement aggressive anti-automation security. I can easily automate websites with existing tools until I slam into that wall.
Great question - we tried so many things and overtime, we ended up doing 2 things - custom chromium build and extension to solve captchas. In our docs, checkout stealth mode - https://intunedhq.com/docs/main/02-features/stealth-mode-cap...
Also, one of our engineers did a write up on bot detection systems and how they work - https://intunedhq.com/blog/how-bot-detection-works
This never made it into prod since the scale was small, but one of the favorite leaks I found when working on bot detection was browsers which generated the same random numbers. Presumably because they were being init to the same VM snapshot and therefore the same random number state.
oh neat!
So far its cost me $2.27 to submit a contact form 3 times - why is this better than a captcha solver with human solves at 1000 per $2?
On your automation, your tool fed back to me as follows after 3 submissions:
> The CAPTCHA is persistently blocking now — Prosopo's widget appears to have flagged the session/IP due to the repeated submissions. The checkbox won't reset this time. This is expected behavior from their bot protection product. To submit again, you'd likely need to wait a while for the rate limit to clear, or submit manually from your own browser.
The cost is AI cost for using the agent - not captcha cost. Usually, you would write the project and then call it via API - instead of asking the agent to do the action more than 1 time. Considering using the web task API for this use case.
Congrats on launch. I have experienced these issues first hand with `Open Finance` a few years ago.
I feel that you'll end up being an automation agency (you mentioned UiPath), companies who have the skills and capacity to build, will not need your service. But those who want the full service, you might fill a gap.
I wish you all the best.
thanks for the kind words! We have been seeing this pattern of customers wanting full service since we launch. Let's see how it goes!
I'm always genuinely curious on how startups navigate the founder maze as it helps to break the myth of an overnight success story.
Based on your YC page, you went through a couple of pivots over the last years:
- 4 years ago: Intuned - The data assistant for engineering leaders [0]
- 2 years ago: Intuned - The browser automation platform for developers and product teams [1]
- 1 year ago: Intuned Auth Sessions - Build authenticated scrapers and RPA [2]
What was kind of the evolution from YC S22 4 years ago till you arrived at today's launch? How did you find your differentiation in a highly commoditized space? Even within YC, there are many competitors like Firecrawl, Reworkd, BrowserUse, NotteLabs, Browserbase, etc.
Another thing that might interest HN: AI crawlers come with negative side effects for website owners (costs, downtime, etc.), as repeatedly reported here on HN (and experienced myself).
Does Intuned respect robots.txt directives and do you disclose the identity of your crawlers via user-agent header?
[0] https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/Gqr-intuned-the-data-as...
[1]https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/LGE-intuned-the-browser...
[2] https://www.ycombinator.com/launches/Lpq-intuned-auth-sessio...
We actually went through 1 hard pivot only, the reset is more about framing the problem as we dug deeper and understood the customers and issue more. As an example, "Intuned Auth Sessions" is just a feature that we still support today! But you are right, being a founder is not easy and the hardest part is figuring out what to build, does it make sense to keep going or should you stop - those are questions I still struggle with until today.
For your question about how is this different - I think if you dig into those product you will see that our focus is different, many of the companies mentioned are focused on powering agents via APIs, some are focused on enabling users to use AI at runtime, we do feel that our product is somewhat differentiated - the closest one is possibly Reworkd and I would still say the product is somewhat different. Now, the hardest part is actually commenting this with customers and the market in general - and there, we have a lot to figure out!
For robots.txt and user-agents question, we think of ourselves as providing infrastructure and flexibility for our customers to do what they want - we do encourage in our docs that they respect robots.txt but we don't enforce it on a platform level.
Appreciate you taking the time to leave this comment - very thoughtful
I create scrapers on my own when I need one, but this is a cool idea. Best of luck with it.
thanks! give us a try next time and checkout fix with ai when the scraper breaks!
This is a really neat idea. Congrats on the launch!
thank you!
Is this a bet that Computer Use models don't get better and cheaper?
If you think about "price", "speed" and "accuracy (reliability/quality)", our bet is that models won't hit those 3 together. So you won't get a model that is very fast, very cheap and very accurate anytime soon.
Also, imagine that you have a case where you want to scrape 10,000 records from a website, why have AI navigate to every page to do this? why not write the code, run it, and get consistent and fast result? its also predictable, if it messes up, you know what happened and you can trace it to the exact line of code.
What is the advantage of your product over having Codex generate a script using something like https://github.com/D4Vinci/Scrapling?
our product is infra + agent. You can use codex or other agent to generate the code. We actually have a cli that allows you to deploy projects to our infrastructure.
We are actually working on open sourcing a plugin that you can use with any coding harness!
cool but we already pay $200/month to OpenAI to turn automation into code
definitely came up multiple times. Next week, we are releasing our codex/claude plugin, so you will be able to use codex to create the projects and deploy them to Intuned.
Intuned as a platform to deploy browser automation adds a lot - anti-bot detection, jobs, observability and more.
I see I'm already using a FOSS project for anti-bot
for jobs/durability/obs i have sqlite and had codex generate an ugly but functional dashboard
im just curious to know what intune does that is different
other than the stuff I mentioned, it’s the deep integration between the agent and platform. Because we have obserabiltity, you can open a failed run, and with a click of a button fix it. you can also enable self healing on a project which puts it on autopilot. we have a lot to improve on but if you have 10+ active scrapes, intuned as a package saves users time and pain.
are there code or demo i can view
that sounds interesting
fix with ai - https://youtu.be/e4R4hLdHBro self-healing demo - https://youtu.be/IVHIXw0lYMs
I am happy to give you a demo over a call as well
Where have you found early traction with users? Why has your solution been useful for these users relevant to the other options?
Yes, we we did our YC and social launches, we had few companies sign up and we have been building with them sense. For some of them, we have enabled them to run 1000+ scrapers which would have been very hard without Intuned. Some of these have been with us for 2+ years! What our users love is the agent and the idea that we are not using AI at runtime which improves reliability.
How well would this work for a "go to hotel booking site, book 2 weeks in June for a family of 4" type of workflows?
this is not meant as personal assistant to do a task like this - the idea is that if you want to build a travel assistant and you want to do an integration with a travel booking service using browser automation - you can use Intuned to build this integration and expose an API to do search and one to do a booking, etc. Does this make sense?
this is actually really cool
thank you!
What's the benefit of using playwright instead of an official webdriver directly?
We actually do support CDP directly as well. As for why playwright, playwright provides a lot of benefits that we like in terms of being code - like auto-waiting, good syntax for a lot of operations, agents can use playwright pretty well and playwright is generally like by the community we target.
If a customer, doesn't want to use playwright, they don't have to given CDP but we most of our templates use playwright.