Pricing & Limits

With Kernel, you only pay for what you use and nothing more. You don’t pay for idle time thanks to Standby Mode, idle browsers in a browser pool incur no usage charges, and you’re never charged for proxies.

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Pricing

Note: GPU acceleration is only available on headful, on-demand browsers. Standby mode is not supported for GPU-accelerated browsers.

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Pricing calculator

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Managed infrastructure

Note: Included monthly credits apply to usage costs only.

Note: Audit logs are available on Start-Up and Enterprise plans, with 1-year retention. Continuous export delivers audit events to your own S3 bucket as gzipped JSON Lines (.jsonl.gz), with managed IAM/KMS setup, reliable delivery, and monitoring.

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Browser pools

With browser pools, you pay the standard usage-based price per GB-second while browsers are running. Idle browsers in a browser pool incur no usage charges — you only pay when a browser is actively in use, so an idle browser pool costs nothing between tasks.

Note: GPU acceleration is not available for browser pools.

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Managed Auth

Managed Auth is included on all paid plans with no per-connection fees. Under the hood, it uses browser sessions to log in and keep your sessions fresh—these count toward your browser usage and concurrency like any other browser session. Auth sessions are fast (typically 5-30 seconds each). Kernel monitors session health and re-authenticates automatically when sessions expire—most stay valid for days. For example, keeping 100 auth connections logged in typically costs less than $5/month in browser usage.

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Concurrency limits

Kernel enforces a single concurrency limit covering all browsers you run at once — whether created on demand with browsers.create() or maintained in a browser pool. Your full limit is available to either API in any mix.

Note: A browser pool counts toward your concurrency limit whether or not its browsers are currently acquired — a browser pool sized to 40 browsers uses 40 of your limit. Browser pools are available on Start-Up and Enterprise plans.

Note: Browsers in Standby Mode count against your concurrency limit.

Note: Limits are org-wide by default unless stated otherwise. Managed auth profiles refer to profiles with active auth connections that Kernel maintains using your stored Credentials or 1Password connection. A single profile can have multiple auth connections (one per domain) — see Profiles for details.

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Rate limiting

Kernel enforces per-organization rate limits on API requests. When you exceed the rate limit, the API returns a 429 Too Many Requests response with a Retry-After header indicating how many seconds to wait before retrying. Rate-limited endpoints include these headers on every response: All Kernel SDKs automatically retry 429 responses up to 2 times, respecting the Retry-After header for delay timing. If retries are exhausted, the SDK throws a typed RateLimitError with the response headers accessible for custom backoff logic. If you need higher rate limits, contact us.