Join the discussion
Write your take first — we'll ask for email only when you're ready to publish.
- Hacker News
- Who are your primary customers/usecases?
What do you think of just reverse engineering the network requests and writing scripts to hit the underlying APIs that the browser is making instead of tackling at the browser automation layer?
by arjunchint - Hi Arjun, our customers use Intuned for a wide range of use cases, the main ones being: govtech and insurance tech. In addition, agencies that specialize in scraping for their customers.
Our Intuned agent and Web Task API always use reverse engineering when possible — the underlying agents have access to the network layer and can reverse engineer APIs when needed. At the end of the day, this comes down to what the user needs. We have seen cases where users need data from the network, and in these cases we skip the browser layer. In some other cases, we saw that users need to authenticate via the browser but then all the automation can be done via the network. We have also seen customers who want to get markdown of the pages in addition to hitting the APIs so a browser layer is a must.
by ahmadilaiwi - Salam. I'm currently working on a very similar idea but through a no code UX perspective https://usetwobytwo.com. Nice to see you guys see the same issue exist.by adamgoodapp
- Salam, very interesting. curious why abstracting the code? For us, exposing code gives the user way more control and visibility about what's happening with their automations.by ahmadilaiwi
- 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?by rrr_oh_man
- 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?by fkilaiwi
- Where have you found early traction with users? Why has your solution been useful for these users relevant to the other options?by ianm218
- 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.by fkilaiwi
- That looks great - I need to give it a try in my free time. Bot protections are obviously the biggest pain point and make these kind of autmations less reliable. We’re facing the same issues at monity.ai, and it requires constant work on improvements. Currently, we use headful Camoufox + residential proxies (cheap or more robust depending on the plan), and the results are pretty good.by kamilms21
- yeah, bot detection is one! we ended up forking chromium and doing a custom chrome extension to solve captchas. This stuff is annoying but we had to do it.
Overall, the value we see comes from the integration between the platform and the agent, things like looking at a trace of a failure in the platform and hitting a button to fix it and getting code that you can review and merge has been life changing for our customers.
by fkilaiwi - In terms of ICP, there is a wonderful underbelly of scraper/drop/deliberate automation evasion resellers for basically every consumer product niche -- think shoes, watches, anything limited-edition, etc. These people mostly are building bots and constantly in a coy cat and mouse game with the sites they buy from to avoid blocks.
Not only could this help them keep up with the new security features and redesigns, but they are more than willing to pay for a product that meaningfully improves overall success rate. You should look on twitter/discord for these kinds of groups, they are "reseller"-type communities.
by Hasz - thanks for the idea!by fkilaiwi
- 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
by fkilaiwi - 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.
by Oras - 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!by fkilaiwi
- 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.by trollbridge
- I had this problem with https://gitlab.com/gabriel.chamon/yagi which is Yet Another Stalker Gamma Installer. In my region, Brazil, I get cloudflare captchas when downloading assets from moddb. Using a VPN solves this but then latency and speed goes out the window. What worked for this particular case was to use an unmodified Firefox build and interact with it indirectly with it's limited interface: launch the browser with the download URL, solve captcha once, have the automation look for the download start at the browser's sqlite db then wait for the download to finish looking at the filesystem. Anything, even marionette would trigger cloudflares anti automation, even if I was solving the captcha manually.by gchamonlive
- 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
by fkilaiwi - Curious how you handle trust boundaries for tool outputs here. Do you keep a signed or replayable trace so a developer can audit what the agent saw before it acted?by xms17189
- 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?
by bronco21016 - thanks! i asked my teammate working on bot detection to respond, he can better answer this!by fkilaiwi
- Use the real browser: clawchrome.com. You can evaluate code on the page, do network capture, screenshot. But it’s the real browser, no fork, no cdp.
For lower RTT you’ll need an instance and proxy close to upstream but a real browser will help with scraping detection.
by gvkhna - Hi Bronco, Omar here, a Lead Platform Engineer at Intuned.
> I've tried adding browser automation outside of the single click from the extension, and I'm immediately met with bot detection.
Can you explain how you write your automation? How do you do the click from the extension? Do you use CDP input commands to perform the click (`Input.dispatchMouseEvent`), or do you execute JS code and click the button using `element.click`? using CDP will give you much better score than Executing JS to click a captcha button. JS Execution can be easily detected by any bot detection provider. On the other hand, using CDP to click can mimic actual mouse movement and will make it much harder to detect abnormalities. and the click event will have `isTrusted=true` and handle detection methods related to monitoring JS executions on page.
> 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?
Modified browsers reduce your bot score a lot, and Camoufox is a great option to test out. Will it work? It depends on how the website has set up their bot detection. using modified browser is a must for use case.
At Intuned, we use our own internal forked Chrome to hide the most popular signals, and a lot of the time, the browser alone without a residential proxy can help us bypass most websites, but not all of them(IP reputation has very high heuristic value).
I can't give exact recommendation on what will work with you for sure since each website has it's own ways to handle bot detection , one recommendation I can give is to try to use packages like patchright they can help alot and hide alot of popular signals.
Another recommendation I can make is to try using intuned agent and ask it to help you find a way to bypass bot detection on that website. If you can handle it using network interception or some other scraping technique, the agent is really good in these cases and knows most of the used scraping techniques.
by omarbish