Day 450: birthing the cloud

product

Worked my butt off today and Browserflow Cloud is coming along really nicely! I’m stoked to see this finally come to life. ~ in da zone bby ~

Initial use case for Browserflow Cloud: Extract data from a site and save it to Google Sheets on a periodic basis

Required features:

  • Get Element Text support
  • Saving to Google Sheets
  • Cookies support (to avoid the need for putting in username/password)
  • Scheduled runs
  • Debugging support (e.g. showing a screenshot of the page when an error occurs)

Nice-to-have features:

  • Loop Elements support

  • Webhook (calling a URL when the flow completes)

    • Will allow integrating with Zapier/Integromat

  • API endpoint to run a flow

Super nice-to-have features:

  • Residential proxies to prevent getting blocked due to requests coming from Google’s data center
  • CAPTCHA solver

There’s a product challenge here in that not all commands will be supported in the cloud. For example, things like Ask for Input just won’t make sense because it requires human input.

This raises a bigger product question: Do I focus on promoting the local case or the remote case? They have quite different use cases, so it’s not like running things in the cloud will necessarily always be superior.