Day 328: Browserflow Master Plan (Cont.)

On Day 193, I wrote down my master plan for Browserflow: Create the best tool for creating flows and use that to allow people to run flows in the cloud.

(Before I continue with this, I just want to call out this little gem from that post: “For the past 50 days, I’ve been working on Browserflow and I (still!) haven’t launched.” Hahahahahaahahahahahaahahahaha. Sweet summer child. If only I could go back in time to tell my very slightly younger self that he still wouldn’t have launched after over half a year.)

Back to the master plan. I’ve been tinkering with the pieces to make it a reality, and the pipe dream to get all this stuff working in the cloud is starting to come together. I’m freaking stoked!!! There’s still like 90% of the work remaining, and it’s a bummer that most of it will be me reimplementing what I did in the Chrome extension in Puppeteer, but there’s enough here that I think everything should work out. (I might be extra optimistic right now because I spent all day struggling with what looked like a deal-breaking limitation and figured it out right before writing this post.)

The best part about this master plan is that it makes pricing and growth much, much easier. Before, when I was thinking about how to charge for Browserflow, I thought of limiting how much you can use Browserflow. For example, it could be tiered off of the number of commands you run so that you get X free commands a month and have to pay to use more. It would price Browserflow proportional to the amount of value people got from it.

While that idea is fine and I’m still open to it, one thing I didn’t like about it was that it would limit growth. My hypothesis is that there will be a passionate set of users who deeply integrate Browserflow in their workflows and creating tons of flows. I want to encourage those users, because the more flows they create and share, the more use cases Browserflow will solve, and the more people will find out about Browserflow. That wouldn’t happen if people hit a paywall and were discouraged from continuing to invest in the tool.

Having Browserflow run in the cloud solves this problem nicely. Running flows locally can be completely free while running flows in the cloud would be paid and support the business. People would be able to test out Browserflow, share it with their friends and coworkers, and use it to their heart’s content without having to worry about paying. But if they ever came across a need to automate something on a regular basis without them having to manually trigger it, then there’d be minimal friction to upgrading because of their familiarity and trust in the tool. It’s perfect. Now I just have to get it working.

can’t wait to look back on this post in six months and laugh/cry about how no one’s using browserflow locally or in the cloud lmao