Launch HN: Skyvern (YC S23) – open-source AI agent for browser automations
Hey HN, we’re Suchintan and Shu from Skyvern (https://www.skyvern.com). We’re building an open source tool to help companies automate browser-based workflows using LLMs.

Our open source repo is at https://github.com/Skyvern-AI/Skyvern, and we're excited to share our cloud version with you (https://app.skyvern.com) :)

Skyvern allows you to define a single (or a series of) goal-based prompts to instruct an agent to complete complex tasks on websites. Here’s a quick demo of Skyvern: https://www.loom.com/share/76b231309df74a528061fcf102e1967f

We built this to solve a specific problem: building browser automations often requires companies to either hire people and scale out operations teams to do tedious manual work, or hire developers to use products like UI-Path or Selenium to build automations.

Code-based solutions always run into the same problem: they’re brittle (wow this website added a new pop-up dialog and my script broke), and fail to achieve the same objective across multiple websites (how can I fill out a contact-us form on hundreds of different websites?)

We did a Show HN a few months ago (https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39706004), and
since then, we’ve onboarded customers for a wide variety of use cases: generating insurance quotes on websites like Geico.com; applying to jobs on websites like lever.co; automating filing permits in local government portals; registering new corporations for employment identification; fetching invoices from hundreds of different portals such as hydroone.com; automating purchasing on a handful of e-commerce websites like zooplus.com; and filling out contact us forms on a bunch of random smb websites (such as HVAC websites).

To be able to service all of these, we’ve built and open-sourced quite a few interesting features:

(1) a fully-featured React application allowing you to see every action Skyvern is taking in real-time;

(2) livestreaming browser instances to allow our users to see what Skyvern is doing when running inside of a docker container;

(3) authenticated sessions, integrating with Bitwarden and allowing users to specify Email + Phone + QR-code based 2FAs;

(4) “workflows” allowing users to chain multiple goal-based prompts together, which can handle tasks like invoice downloading, or automating purchasing pipelines;

(5) processing HTML Elements (ex. identifying + summarizing SVGs) and performing website interactions (ex. Iterating over dynamic autocompletes to fill in address information correctly)

(6) “cached workflows”, allowing Skyvern to memorize previous interactions (ie text inputs) and re-use them in future runs.

We’ve also been blessed with a few model advancements to solve some of the cost concerns the community brought up. Skyvern’s token costs went down 80% from $15 / 1M tokens (GPT-4V) to $2.50 / 1M tokens (GPT-4O)

Despite the model costs going down 80%, Skyvern is still quite expensive to run, so we give every new user $5 of credits to try it out and see if it can be useful for you.

We would be honored if you could give it a try at https://app.skyvern.com and share some feedback with us, and we look forward to any and all of your comments!