Challenge

Just as web browsers like Chrome and Firefox make the internet accessible to humans, AI agents need their own browsers to navigate and interact with the web. Motivated by his frustration with headless browser infrastructure in his previous roles, Paul Klein launched Browserbase in 2024 to help power the rising demand for AI-driven automation. With headless browsers, AI agents and applications can access the internet autonomously to automate workflows, collect data, and complete transactions.

When building the platform, Klein knew that Browserbase would need a usage-based billing model to accurately charge customers based on the exact number of browser session minutes they consumed. Because customer usage can vary significantly from a few browser hours to thousands per month, usage-based billing ensures customers only pay for what they use, making it a fair, scalable model for both early-stage teams and enterprise workloads. With customers running hundreds of millions of browser sessions per month, Browserbase’s billing solution would need to be highly accurate, reliable, and able to handle real-time usage tracking at scale without creating billing bottlenecks.

“We are measuring a lot of usage and have a variety of ways people can get discounts. That meant we needed a flexible billing platform that is highly accurate even with large quantities of data,” said Klein, Browserbase’s founder and CEO.

From his experience developing infrastructure products at other companies, Klein had seen firsthand how complex and resource-intensive building payments and billing infrastructure could be. He knew that building a billing system from scratch would take months of developer time, delaying Browserbase’s go-to-market timeline. Instead, the company wanted to partner with a billing provider that could support automated billing, subscription flexibility, and pricing experimentation—including offering new payment tiers and volume-based discounts.

Solution

Browserbase launched with Stripe as its payment solution, using Stripe Billing to create a bundled monthly subscription plus a usage-based billing model. Customers select a base plan that includes a set amount of browser session hours each month, with additional hours billed at a pay-as-you-go rate so customers can scale their usage as needed. This hybrid approach gives Browserbase predictable recurring revenue while offering the flexibility that customers expect from infrastructure tools.

With its usage-based billing features, Billing provided Browserbase a single platform to ingest customer usage data, calculate users’ total bills, and process payments. Browserbase tracks hundreds of millions of agent browser session minutes per month, automatically sending precise usage data to the right subscriber’s account in Billing. That way, customers are accurately charged each billing cycle based on their actual consumption.

With Billing, customers can sign up, select a plan, and enter their credit card information to start using Browserbase in minutes. Stripe automates payment collection and delivery of a follow-up invoice each month, ensuring customers have complete visibility into their usage and costs. Those features meant that Browserbase’s engineers only needed to handle the initial Billing integration and did not have to spend time overseeing billing automation, payment processing, and other subscription management tasks.

After its launch, Browserbase used Billing to experiment with its product offerings and pricing. This allowed the company to offer volume-based discounts and new plan tiers to optimize customer acquisition and retention—without making significant changes to its billing infrastructure.

Results

Browserbase uses metered billing to generate millions in revenue

Browserbase uses Stripe’s usage-based billing to track and bill hundreds of customers for hundreds of millions of browser session minutes per month with complete accuracy, enabling the company to drive millions in revenue in its first year. Stripe automatically aggregates usage data, applies the appropriate charges and discounts, and bills the customer’s credit card on file without manual intervention.

“Stripe Billing scaled with us throughout our entire business from zero to millions of dollars in revenue,” said Klein. “I’ve seen firsthand how painful billing infrastructure is to develop and manage, and with Stripe we don’t have to worry about it. It would take us five times the amount of effort to manage billing and payments without Stripe.”

Stripe accelerates Browserbase’s go-to-market time

Adopting Stripe from Day 1 allowed Browserbase to launch its headless browser infrastructure for AI agents and applications without waiting to build out custom metered billing infrastructure.

“Stripe allowed us to start charging customers much earlier on in our lifecycle. We don’t have any engineers managing our billing. We just had to set it up and then forget about it,” said Klein.

Browserbase pricing experiments drive customer growth

With Stripe, developers can sign up for Browserbase in minutes, allowing them to instantly start using the platform and achieving value. Since its launch, Browserbase has used Stripe to experiment with offering volume-based discounts and launch a free-tier plan that has helped it drive a 17% increase in new customer signups within 1 month.

“We’ve been able to add more billing features quite easily without having to think about how to architect them,” said Klein. “I imagine it has saved us months of developer time.”