How are you guys running Playwright/Puppeteer in production?
I’ve been going down the rabbit hole of browser-based scraping lately and I’m curious how people here are handling it in production.
Are you running Playwright/Puppeteer on your own VPS/Kubernetes, or using something like Browserless, Browserbase, ZenRows, Bright Data, etc.?
I’m mostly wondering:
What’s been the biggest pain point?
Is it browser crashes?
Scaling?
Proxy management?
Cloud costs?
CAPTCHAs?
Anti-bot detection?
Something else entirely?
If you’re self-hosting, what made you decide not to use a managed service?
And if you’re already paying for one, what’s the main reason? Reliability? Less maintenance? Better success rate?
I’m asking because I’m trying to understand what problems are actually worth solving instead of making assumptions. Every blog post says something different, but I’d rather hear from people who are running this stuff every day.
Would love to hear your setup and what’s been working (or not working) for you.