Replies: 18 comments 33 replies
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I found this repository when I urgently needed a free solution for browser automation, and at the time the project felt like a real find. Everything I needed was there out of the box: the patches worked reliably, the Chromium engine gave more trust from anti-bot systems, and the fingerprinting system — while not perfect — was noticeably improving with every release. And that was against the backdrop of all the competitors: something similar existed, but it was either poorly suited for development or relied on JS patches. Building on top of ungoogled-chromium, you've made incredible progress, and the work on the project never stops. Despite how unfortunate the situation is — developers' work should be valued. Since the project doesn't have major sponsors, moving to a paid model may be the only realistic solution, and users should approach this with understanding. Thank you for your work — it really is time to monetize it. The approach you're proposing (always one free version one generation behind + Pro for the latest) looks like a fair compromise. It will still be, arguably, the best solution on the market for developers. Personally, I use CloakBrowser for pet projects without serious monetization, and for my use case a comfortable ceiling would be around $10/month. I have a question about the licensing model that I think is relevant not just for me. Let's say a developer with a Pro subscription builds an application or tool on top of the latest binary. A few scenarios:
It would be great if you could clarify upfront how the Pro tier will relate to distributing and bundling the binary. This would remove a lot of questions for people building something on top of CloakBrowser. And one more thing — I'd like to offer my help if it's ever needed. It's been really awesome to find your repository and watch it grow by leaps and bounds. Wishing you the best of luck, and I hope everything works out. It's a shame that no major sponsors have come along yet and the project has simply become too big to keep fully free. |
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Cloak Browser was also a revelation for me. Previous similar projects, which allowed me to amateurishly scrape two websites whose data I needed for my own needs, have either been discontinued or are now being detected. On a side note, it's a shame that with so many users, so many people are willing to buy someone a coffee or a beer :( |
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I think locking the latest version behind a paid tier and only making it publicly available when updating to a new version of Chrome is fair |
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I know asking about mirror sites before CloakBrowser was commercialized seems a bit odd. But have you considered hosting a paid version (including the paywall) and a free version on a mirror site available in mainland China? Currently, most cloud service providers in mainland China, including Tencent Cloud, cannot download the file from https://cloakbrowser.dev/chromium-v146.0.7680.177.3/cloakbrowser-linux-x64.tar.gz or https://github.com/CloakHQ/CloakBrowser/releases/download/chromium-v146.0.7680.177.3/cloakbrowser-linux-x64.tar.gz . This file almost always needs to be uploaded to an S3 bucket and then manually downloaded and used in the Dockerfile. In contrast, version 1.58.0 of |
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I'm all for paying for the latest version. It's totally normal to get paid for the hard work you put in. Now, talking about this anti-detection solution, most users are running their own projects and making money from them. When you weigh the loss of getting accounts blocked and businesses shut down against the cost of a better solution, it makes perfect sense and there's plenty of room to invest in it. Keep going! I hope this project sticks around and keeps getting better! |
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I think this approach to commercializing the project is completely justified. A project of this scale simply cannot remain sustainable without proper funding and long-term sponsor support, especially when it requires constant maintenance, patching, reverse engineering, and adaptation to every Chromium update. At one point, CloakBrowser became the ideal solution for me, and honestly there are very few alternatives that can compete with it right now. One of the biggest reasons is that the project focuses on native-level browser behavior instead of relying on JavaScript-based emulation tricks that many other solutions use. That seems like a sustainable balance between supporting the developers and keeping the project accessible to the community. |
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The approach seems fair. Keeping the latest version behind a paywall and keeping the free tier a version behind is reasonable. I think a ceiling of 15$ - 20$ USD monthly will be reasonable for most users. |
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Maybe I would pay $5-10/month for the latest browser version. |
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I don't think it is justified to monetize it. One of the main advantages you always boasted about in your website is the fact that it is very stealthy and still free, unlike the competitors. Also, Camoufox used to always be free and was totally undetectable before its developer had health issues and had to step back. If Camoufox was able to sustain itself for free, why can't you? Shame on you and on all the bots in the comments section. I will unstar. |
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Maintaining CloakBrowser takes time and energy. You are not entitled to anything free because the creation of that thing was not free |
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Maintaining Camoufox in 2024/2025 also took time and energy, but it was always free. What's really annoying isn't the monetization itself as much as it is lying in your website and claiming that one of the advantages of CloakBrowser is that it offers all that for free, unlike other stealth browsers. Your website has a giant table that boasts about this lie. If you had been honest from the start, no one would blame you. |
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n-1版不还是免费的么? |
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I'm from Russia. Zennoposter and Zennobrowser are very popular there. The software is paid, plus paid updates every six months. In Zennobrowser, everything is free but limited to 2 simultaneous threads. More than that is paid. There is also a subscription for synchronization. Take the n8n project — it's completely free but very complex. They make money by hosting paid versions on their own servers, plus a large user base, verification types, and environment variables. If you follow Zennoposter’s model, about 80% of users will leave because there are alternatives. If you follow n8n’s model, everyone might stay, but revenue will be lower. There is a large market of traffic arbitrage specialists. Market leaders: Multilogin, Incogniton, and formerly Linken Sphere. Russia and the CIS became major centers for traffic arbitrage, especially aggressive and automated forms. The culture and tools later spread to Western, European, and Asian markets. If you find the right approach for arbitrage teams working with Facebook, Google, plus automation and AI models, there is serious money. Existing products are expensive, and people pay because arbitrage is high-margin. Smart strategy: separate the core browser from paid modules like arbitrage tools, multi-accounting, synchronization, team grouping, and cookie import/export. Make those commercial. Many teams and developers have moved from Russia and CIS to the West, Europe, and Asia, taking the industry with them. Monetization for CloakBrowser developers: don’t just compete on features. Go deeper into the arbitrage workflow. Free core: browser with unlimited profiles, 2–3 simultaneous threads, basic fingerprint spoofing. Paid modules: team and sync subscription per seat, cookie import/export, bulk profile management, AI-assisted automation. Ecosystem add-ons: SMS activation integration with a revenue cut, built-in proxy rental with rotation, auto-registration tools for Facebook, Google, TikTok charged per scenario or subscription. Multilogin and Incogniton sell only the browser. You would sell the whole workflow — browser, proxies, SMS, auto-registration, automation — in one place. That is a stronger offer for teams currently using 4–6 separate tools. The market has money. It just needs one coherent product. Еще 1 Direct integration with snippets for n8n and similar platforms n8n — open-source, 100k+ GitHub stars, 200k active users Monetization: a paid "CloakBrowser Connector" module that plugs into any of these platforms. Sold as an add-on.
Mouse movement emulation: trembling, acceleration, deceleration, random deviation — each element on the page behaves differently (the mouse approaches a button differently than a headline or an image) This is precisely what Multilogin and Incogniton don't offer at this level. It's a direct strike at their weakest point.
Paid modules: multi-accounting, synchronization, team management, cookie import/export Taking a step toward the arbitrage community gives you a paying audience that is already used to spending money on tools. They are not looking for cheap — they are looking for what works and doesn't get banned. Give them that, and they will pay. "I'm telling you this as a former arbitrage specialist. My team and I paid $100–150 per browser back in 2015–2017. In arbitrage, time matters — time is money. And this is your chance." |
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I vote against making the human behavior module paid. That part of the code has been contributed to by the community under the expectation that it remains open-source and free and available for everyone to use. I have no problem making the browser paid, but I do have an issue with making the cloakbrowser package paid. Even if a fork is created and closed-source patches are added, it would still leave a bad taste in my mouth. |
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Is Zenno still alive? Worked about 12 years with ZennoPoster until ZennoLab was acquired and greed became the only thing that mattered. Customers were just lied to and ripped off, while Zenno kept getting worse and worse until it was basically unusable. Regarding the human behaviour module: I don't think you can claim money for it. Made a much more sophisticated human behaviour emulation in about half an hour. |
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They are still alive and well I stopped using them because they basically became useless for the major sites with advanced bot detection. |
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I am willing to pay. I used camofox before but it doesn't work anymore with cloudflare. Your work solves a problem for me. The most important thing is that you can continue with what you are doing. That is in my interest as well. |
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To be honest, I wouldn't mind paying monthly for this |
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Update: CloakBrowser Pro is live (early access) First, thank you. The feedback in this thread genuinely shaped how we shipped this, and we read every single comment. The model (as proposed here, unchanged)
One change: we skipped v147 What's live now
Two honest caveats (this is early access)
On bundling and licensing (@evelaa123, good questions)
@linghengqian on China mirrors: noted. We know downloads from cloakbrowser.dev and GitHub are unreliable from mainland China. We are looking at a configurable download host / mirror. If others need this, a +1 here helps us prioritize. We'd still love your input
Thanks again for being part of this. |
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Theirs is the same.
Maybe, but I'm much more concerned about cheap entry plans and you should too.
They're moving faster and are on chromium 149 already. Please check the "Fingerprint Parameters" section on this page if you truly believe you're better them then (you're not and will probably learn something from them): |
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In a nutshell! |
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@smudgesmudge32 thank you, really appreciate the support. Yes, macOS 148 is at full parity with Linux and Windows. Same patch set, nothing held back, GPU and the other platform-level signals are corrected on macOS the same way they are on Windows. A Mac Pro license gets the identical protection. On the roadmap, the headline item after launch is something most stealth browsers quietly fail at. In Docker, Linux, and headless environments, the browser renders graphics and audio in software, not on a real GPU. So even when a browser claims to be, say, a Windows machine with an NVIDIA card, its actual canvas, WebGL, and audio output don't match what that real hardware would produce. Anti-bot systems increasingly check exactly this, the gap between the claimed device and the real rendering output, and it's how a lot of "undetectable" setups get caught. We're closing that gap at the source level, so the rendered output lines up with genuine device hardware across every environment, including Docker and Linux. That's the main focus. Alongside it: more frequent binary updates as Chromium and the detection systems move, more platform and tooling work, and profile management. Thanks again for backing the project, it genuinely helps us keep going. |
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@eofreternal appreciate you pushing on this, and you're right that one more session costs us nothing at the margin. But so far we've only heard what you'd remove. We're genuinely open here, so let me turn it around: what would you do instead? If session tiers feel arbitrary, what's the axis you'd price on? Flat single price for everyone? Feature based tiers? Pay by something else entirely? You run 10+ sessions and clearly think about this, so if you've got a model in mind we want to hear it. "Don't cap sessions" we understand. The harder question is how a one person project funds daily anti-bot patching without it. If you've got an answer to that, it genuinely shapes what we ship next. Thanks again for keeping us honest. CloakHQ |
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If I were in your place, a much fairer pricing option would be to have 2 tiers. One tier for people that won't bundle the browser, and other tier for people that will. And maybe a third tier for people that need extra features or support or some such. If sessions on paid tiers are limited, that means the free version on GitHub would be better for users, even if it was a month or two behind the frontier (and the solution to the free version being better is not to limit it to one session) In my experience, being a month or two behind the frontier doesn't matter all that much in terms of being detected. So the pipeline would be this: The user uses it in production and really likes it The user then may decide to pay for the one of the tiers to get better support, to support development, and to get the latest browser I feel this would be a better pipeline/experience for people developing with CloakBrowser. |
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Update: macOS Pro is now live. In the early-access post above we listed macOS as "coming" — it's shipped. The latest v148 Pro binary now covers macOS (Apple Silicon + Intel), alongside Linux and Windows. The free macOS build (v145) is unaffected. Details at cloakbrowser.dev. Thanks to everyone here who said they needed Mac — this closes that gap. 🙂 |
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Excellent thank you for the MacOS release. To confirm is 148 on MacOS feature parity with Linux and Windows (same number of C++ patches) etc. Do you have any rough roadmap for pro. Personally, I think the pricing is fine - thank you for the great work and happy to support you guys. |
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Is it correct that even the latest paid v148 kernel based version of CloakBrowser is detected on https://fingerprint.com/demo/ and https://demo.fingerprint.com/playground ? 
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Thanks for flagging this. Out of the box (zero config) the binary can show as detected on FingerprintJS's own demo — it's one of the strictest checks anywhere and they tune specifically against stealth browsers. But the latest v148 binary passes it with the right setup: a residential proxy, browser = launch(
headless=False,
proxy="http://user:pass@residential-proxy:port",
geoip=True,
args=[
"--fingerprint-noise=false", # prevents tampering detection
"--fingerprint-windows-font-metrics", # 148+ binary, needs Windows fonts on Linux
],
)
page = browser.new_page()
page.goto("https://demo.fingerprint.com/playground")Result on Requires a Chromium 148+ binary + Windows fonts installed. If you're on a persistent context there's one extra step (a Widevine CDM) — full details here → https://github.com/CloakHQ/cloakbrowser#detected-by-fingerprintjs If it's still flagged after that, please open an issue with your launch config (proxy type, headless/headed, OS) — easier to track and debug there than in this thread. Happy to dig in. |
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One thing worth making explicit: If you're on Pro and a legitimate site isn't working for you, that's our problem to solve, not yours. Most fixes are a quick config tweak. When a fix needs a binary change, we turn new builds around fast. And honestly, almost everything good about this browser came from you. People opening issues, sharing the sites that broke, letting us debug with them. That feedback loop is what made CloakBrowser what it is. Huge thank you to this community. We love you. 🙏 You're paying for the latest binary, and for the support behind it: for it to keep working for your use case, and for us to be on the other end when it doesn't. It also shapes what we build next. The Pro roadmap isn't a feature list we dreamed up. It's whatever our Pro users need to keep their sites working. You tell us what broke, and that's what goes into the next build. Scope: legitimate automation only. Your own accounts, your own data, public sites. Not account creation, credential abuse, or financial/government targets. If you're on Pro and something's blocked that shouldn't be, send it over and we'll dig in. |
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Hello CloakBrowser Team, I am a user of the Free version of CloakBrowser. I've noticed that the v150 Pro build has recently been released. According to previous discussions, there was an assumption that when a new Pro version arrives, the previous stable Pro build (in this case, v148) eventually moves to the Free tier to replace the aging v146. Currently, running ensure_binary() still pulls the 146.0.7680.177.5 build for Free users. |
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@morpheus9393 Thanks for the feedback, though this is honestly surprising to us. For most of our Pro users the v150 binary is working very well across the sites they run, and we test every build against a large matrix of live detection systems before release. That said, no browser passes everything everywhere. Detection outcomes depend heavily on IP reputation, proxy type, profile age, and how the automation behaves, not only on the binary. If you hit something that gets detected, we would genuinely like to see it. Send us the details at support@cloakbrowser.dev: the site, your launch config, proxy type, and the binary version. We will reproduce it and debug it. That is not a formality. Concrete cases are how most of our patches get written, and a single reproducible detection usually turns into a fix that improves the browser for everyone using it. On the free version: answered that properly in my reply to @Proxomotron above. |
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What is the name of “Serious Alternatives”?) |
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Yes, this is already a good and well known list. But mostly contains expensive commercial products that are also overpriced and detected and is completely lacking all the OSS alternatives. |
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luantak, sometimes it's better to keep quiet |
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CloakBrowser launched less than 3 months ago. Since then:
What started as a side project to scratch our own itch turned into something we didn't expect. Hundreds of issues and feature requests, dozens of support requests and custom integration inquiries every day, to the point where we need to bring on additional team members to keep up.
At some point this stopped being a hobby and became a full-time job. That wasn't the plan, but here we are, and we need to figure out how to make it sustainable.
Every Chromium update means porting dozens of patches. Every new anti-bot technique means research, reverse engineering, and new patches. Every issue means reproducing, debugging, and fixing.
To date, the donations and funding we've received don't even cover our build server costs. This project is a full-time effort generating essentially no revenue. We want to be transparent: without a sustainability model, it becomes harder to justify the time and effort this project demands.
What we're thinking about
What's coming in v147
Chromium 147 is incoming, and with it we're developing a rendering correction system. Instead of adding noise to canvas, audio, and font output (which advanced anti-bot systems like CreepJS, FingerprintJS, and BrowserScan can detect as modified), v147 will inject actual rendering output captured from stock Chrome on real hardware.
This means the browser's fingerprint won't just look plausible, it will be identical to a real browser. Sites that currently flag canvas pixel modifications, WebGL rendering mismatches, or audio inconsistencies won't be able to distinguish CloakBrowser from genuine Chrome.
This is the kind of deep R&D that requires sustained funding to maintain.
Why not just donations?
14,000+ stars and we've received about $50-75 in total tips. That doesn't even cover our build server costs. Industry data shows this is normal. 97% of open-source users never contribute back. We don't think donations alone can sustain a project this complex.
We'd love your input
Nothing is decided yet. We want to hear from the community before committing to anything.
Thanks for using CloakBrowser.
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