Company profile · 3 min read
Smooth: a low-latency browser-agent API with explicit task pricing
Browser automation API for autonomous web tasks with persistent sessions, proxies, CAPTCHA support, and developer tooling.
Cofounder of Lazyweb (a16z Speedrun). Previously grew subscriptions and built native ads at Duolingo. Writes First1000 (90,000+ subscribers).
Published · Updated
Smooth is a browser-agent API for developers who need autonomous web actions to be fast, cheap, and repeatable. The buyer decision is whether a browser agent's benchmark and price advantage survives the real site, login, CAPTCHA, proxy, session, and failure conditions in the buyer's workflow.
What it does
Smooth says developers can launch browser tasks through an API, with instant browser spin-up, persistent sessions, custom proxies, auto-CAPTCHA handling, and a free starting tier. Its docs and homepage position it for scraping, testing, and workflow automation, with a WebVoyager score and speed/cost comparisons to Browser Use (Smooth homepage; Smooth docs).
| Fact | What the public sources say |
|---|---|
| Buyer | Developers building browser automation, testing, scraping, and agent workflows |
| API | Task launch, persistent sessions, proxies, browser execution, and result retrieval |
| Public pricing | Free credits; Starter $50/month; Growth $500/month; Enterprise custom |
| Public benchmark claim | Smooth says it scores 92% on WebVoyager and is 5x faster and 7x cheaper than Browser Use |
| Founder | Antonio Vespoli |
Why it fits
Smooth's proposition is operational rather than philosophical. If a workflow needs a browser because there is no API, the developer cares about start time, session persistence, CAPTCHA and proxy behavior, retries, and cost per successful task. A clean four-line API and small models can be useful if the agent still completes the job reliably.
The benchmark and comparison figures are company-published. A buyer should run the exact login, MFA, navigation, rate-limit, failure, and data-boundary cases that matter, and distinguish a benchmark score from success on its own sites. The pricing page includes concurrency, credits, proxies, persistent sessions, and enterprise options; the unit cost still depends on task steps and retries (Smooth pricing).
Vespoli's public background includes a computing master's degree at Imperial College London and three years at AWS on real-time streaming technology (YC company profile).
Short version: Smooth is worth a bake-off for a team that has browser work the APIs cannot cover. Test the failure path and the legal permission to automate the site before trusting the headline speed.
Sources checked — 2026-09-19
Cohort context
Smooth is listed in Fall 2024. In our 2026-09-18 directory snapshot, 57 of 94 listed companies in that cohort have YC’s primary industry label B2B (60.6%). This is a current-directory comparison, not an original intake count or a performance ranking. Nine-cohort dataset.
Public website snapshot
Observed 2026-09-19T16:14:45.256Z in raw homepage HTML. This records visible metadata and advertised links, not agent execution or product quality.
| Signal | Homepage observation |
|---|---|
| Product description metadata | Observed |
| Canonical link | Not observed in this response |
| H1 or H2 heading | Observed |
| Typed structured data | Not observed in this response |
| Docs/developer link | Observed |
| Pricing link | Observed |
| llms.txt link | Not observed in this response |
| Markdown alternate | Not observed in this response |
Public observations · Collection method. Missing links here do not establish that a capability or file is absent elsewhere.
About the author
Cofounder of Lazyweb (a16z Speedrun). Previously grew subscriptions and built native ads at Duolingo. Writes First1000 (90,000+ subscribers).
I cofound Lazyweb and publish Mudpie. This is an owner-written publication, not an independent testing organization. Research notes distinguish observations, sourced reporting and editorial judgment.
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