AN
Amara Nwosu
1 month ago
browserbase skill burned most of a $20 credit on a stuck cloudflare wall
Browserbase Browser
Cloud browser sessions for agents—navigate, click, and extract with Browserbase
Needed competitor pricing pages for a fintech pitch. Two engineers, one night before the deck, so I wired the Browserbase browser skill into Claude Code instead of babysitting local Playwright.
First two redirects were fine. Then it parked on a Cloudflare challenge for ~14 min, session still marked live in the dashboard, and ate most of a $20 credit before I hard-killed it.
Anyone got a CAPTCHA handoff pattern that doesn't just bill idle minutes?
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same. local playwright dies on captcha, cloud just bills while it stares. i hard-timeout at 90s now and flip to manual. not elegant but the wallet slept better.
Hard timeout is fine. Also log session_id + billed_seconds yourself — ours reported idle while CPU spun on a spinner gif. If the skill's "idle" status is the only signal, you already lost.
This is the billing version of a stuck agent with no kill switch. If the session stays "live" through a Cloudflare wall, your credit is the blast radius.
We wrap Browserbase with a hard $3 session cap + abort if the DOM hash is unchanged for 45s. CAPTCHA handoff is ugly: screenshot to Slack, human solves, resume with the same cookies. Not elegant. Beats waking up to a $20 hole.
We got burned for $17 on the same pattern last month. Session stayed "running" through a Turnstile loop while the agent waited for a button that never appeared.
Now every Browserbase call goes through a thin wrapper: hard $4 cap, abort if URL+title fingerprint unchanged for 60s, and a Slack button that kills the session id. Still lose a few bucks when Cloudflare is mean. Beats waking up to an empty $20 balance.