Smooth – Faster, cheaper browser agent API
Hey there HN! We're Antonio and Luca, and we're excited to introduce Smooth, a state-of-the-art browser agent that is 5x faster and 7x cheaper than Browser Use (https://docs.circlemind.co/performance). We built Smooth because existing browser agents were slow, expensive, and unreliable. Even simple tasks could take minutes and cost dollars in API credits. We started as users of Browser Use, but the pain was obvious. So we built something better. Smooth is 5x faster, 7x cheaper, and more reliable. And along the way, we discovered two principles that make agents actually work.…
Smooth – Faster, cheaper browser agent API launched on August 26, 2025 with 54 votes, #474 of 8,530 launches that month and more than 90% of that year's launches. The site was still online in September 2026, 1 year on.
In plain words
Smooth is a browser agent API designed to automate web tasks programmatically. It targets developers and businesses that need reliable browser automation for web scraping, testing, and task automation. The product distinguishes itself through performance optimization, delivering significantly faster execution and lower API costs compared to existing solutions while maintaining higher reliability for complex web interactions.
written from the facts on this page · September 2026
From the sources
Fast, simple, reliable browser agent API. Serverless browser automation that's 5x faster and 7x cheaper than alternatives.
Smooth is a browser agent that can go to the web and perform tasks autonomously. It's the most reliable browser agent yet while also being 7x cheaper and 5x faster. Smooth outperforms all leading alternatives. Whether scraping, testing, or automating workflows - it runs without flaking. Smooth is exceptionally fast. It can perform many tasks in superhuman time, and it's 5x faster then browser-use. Smooth uses small and efficient AI models, making it 7x more affordable than browser-use. End-to-end encryption, enterprise-grade standards, and zero-trust access controls keep your data protected in transit and at rest. Engineered for stability, monitored in real time, and battle-tested under…from smooth.sh
In the maker’s words, at launch
Hey there HN! We're Antonio and Luca, and we're excited to introduce Smooth, a state-of-the-art browser agent that is 5x faster and 7x cheaper than Browser Use (https://docs.circlemind.co/performance). We built Smooth because existing browser agents were slow, expensive, and unreliable. Even simple…
Does a similar job
all alternatives →
Smooth CLI – Token-efficient browser for AI agentsFeb 2026 · docs.smooth.sh · ▲109Hi HN! Smooth CLI (https://www.smooth.sh) is a browser that agents like Claude Code can use to navigate the web reliably, quickly, and affordably. It lets agents specify tasks using natural language, hiding UI complexity, and allowing them to focus on higher-level intents to carry out complex web tasks. It can also use your IP address while running browsers in the cloud, which helps a lot with roadblocks like captchas (https://docs.smooth.sh/features/use-my-ip). Here’s a demo: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=62jthcU705k Docs start at…
Agent BrowserMar 2026 · github.com · ▲149I've built a browser agent harness that outperforms Browser Code on their own benchmark (BU Bench v1), on success rate, speed and cost. Browser Agent: 88% success rate, $5.37, 32,694 seconds Browser Code: 78% success rate, $8.34, 47,970 seconds For browser agents to become ubiquitous, they need to be faster, cheaper, and more reliable. The harness was built with token efficiency in mind (and uses 91% fewer tokens than Browser Code) to reduce the compute and VRAM budget necessary to fine tune a small, specialised model. Because browser agent inference is intermittent, a small specialised…
Web SpeedMay 2026 · getwebspeed.io · ▲118Hey everyone, I've been working on a tool called Web Speed. It takes web pages full of HTML and parses them into an easily readable sitemap for an AI agent. By ensuring the AI doesn't have to analyze the full HTML from the page or screenshots of the page, it makes the agent a lot cheaper and faster. It's MCP-native, so any AI that supports MCP can run it and take control of your browser for you. There are both “normal” and post-auth versions live on GitHub. What I think is the coolest thing about the project is the global cache of sitemaps. When a user visits a site, it takes the sitemap and…
Notte Browser Agents2025 · notte.cc · ▲275Hey HN, We’ve been building browser agents for a while. In production, we kept converging on the same pattern: deterministic scripts for the happy path, agents only for edge cases. So we built Demonstrate Mode. The idea is simple: You perform your workflow once in a remote browser. Notte records the interactions and generates deterministic automation code. How it works: - Record clicks, inputs, navigations in a cloud browser - Compile them into deterministic code (no LLM at runtime) - Run and deploy on managed browser infrastructure Closest analog is Playwright codegen but: - Infrastructure…
More ai this month
the category →
Paintings by AI models: programs run through a simulation of oil paint.
AI · 20d ago · stillwet.art
PixVerse R2▲381A real-time world model you can explore and change
AI · 29d ago · world.pixverse.video
Source: Show HN post ↗ · launch text quoted in part
Launched alongside, August 2025
the whole month →
I built the world's most impractical 1000-pixel display and anyone in the world can draw on it. It draws a single pixel at a time and takes 30-60 minutes to complete a single image. Anyone can participate in the project by voting for the next image to be drawn, and submitting images. https://kilopx.com/
Work · 2025 · benholmen.com
Kitten TTS is an open-source series of tiny and expressive text-to-speech models for on-device applications. We are excited to launch a preview of our smallest model, which is less than 25 MB. This model has 15M parameters. This release supports English text-to-speech applications in eight voices: four male and four female. The model is quantized to int8 + fp16, and it uses onnx for runtime. The model is designed to run literally anywhere eg. raspberry pi, low-end smartphones, wearables, browsers etc. No GPU required! We're releasing this to give early users a sense of the latency and voices…
AI · 2025 · github.com
I was wondering how I can arrange objects along a spherical helix path, and read some articles on it. I ended up learning about parametric equations again, and make this visualization to document what I learned: https://visualrambling.space/moving-objects-in-3d/ feel free to visit and let me know what you think!
Life & fun · 2025 · visualrambling.space
For HTML Day 2025 [1], I made a web service that displays the current sky at your approximate location as a CSS gradient. Colours are simulated on-demand using atmospheric absorption and scattering coefficients. Updates every minute, without the use of client-side JavaScript. Source code and additional information is available on GitHub: https://github.com/dnlzro/horizon [1] https://html.energy/html-day/2025/index.html
Dev tools · 2025 · sky.dlazaro.ca