A yearly discount on an anti-detect browser is worth taking only if you would have stayed past the month where the two prices cross. That month is easy to work out, and it usually arrives sooner than the headline percentage suggests. The other half of the bet is less obvious: you are prepaying for a year of an engine that has to keep pace with Chrome, and that part is not in the price at all.
The break-even month
Take the discount as a fraction, subtract it from one and multiply by twelve. That is how many months of monthly billing the prepaid year costs.
| Yearly discount | The year costs the same as |
|---|---|
| 10% | 10.8 months |
| 20% | 9.6 months |
| 30% | 8.4 months |
| 40% | 7.2 months |
| 50% | 6 months |
So at 40% off you come out ahead if you are still using the tool in month eight. If there is a real chance you will stop, move tools or shrink before then, monthly billing is cheaper in expectation, because the months you would not have paid for are money you do not get back. A large discount is a vendor's estimate of how long people stay. It is worth asking whether you think you will stay longer than they think the average buyer does.
Make 500 profiles in one go, then work on all of them at onceIn Mosaic: Bulk actions. 500 profiles per batch; start, edit and type into many. Free holds 3 profiles. Pro is $49 a month for any number.
Mosaic is a desktop app
Email yourself the link and open it on your computer.
The tier you buy in month one
Most plans in this market are priced in steps of profile count, seats or open browsers. A prepaid year fixes the step as well as the price. Three questions are worth asking the vendor before paying, in writing if the pricing page does not answer them:
- If I need the next tier in month five, do I pay the difference for the rest of the year, or start a new year at the new tier?
- If I need fewer profiles, can I step down before the year ends?
- What happens to profiles above my limit if I do step down?
A discount that looks good on the tier you need today can be poor value on the tier you need in the spring. Profile counts tend to move in one direction for anybody whose work is growing. Why anti-detect browsers cost what they cost explains why per-profile pricing exists, and paying per open browser covers the meter that counts what is open rather than what is stored.
Read the refund terms for a prepaid year
Monthly billing has a built-in exit: you stop paying. A prepaid year needs one written down. Look for whether the year is refundable after the first days, whether a refund is pro rata or nothing, and whether the price is locked for the term or can change at renewal. If the terms are silent, treat the money as spent on day one.
Promotional codes deserve the same reading. A code that takes a further cut off the first year often says nothing about the second, and the renewal comes in at the list price.
The part that is not on the pricing page: the engine
An anti-detect browser is a Chromium build plus whatever the vendor changes in it. Google ships a new Chrome major roughly every four weeks, so a year is about a dozen releases. Each one moves things a page can read: the version in the User-Agent and client hints, which APIs exist, small changes in the network stack.
A profile has to claim a Chrome version, and that claim has to match the browser underneath it. An engine that falls behind leaves two bad options. Its profiles can claim the old major, which fewer real people run every month. Or they can claim the current one on an engine that does not have the current one's features, which a page can compare. Neither shows up in a feature table, and both get worse the further into the year you are.
So before prepaying, check two things you can see for yourself. Which Chrome major does the vendor's browser run today, against the current stable Chrome? And how long did it take them to move last time a new major shipped? A vendor that is a release or two behind on the day you buy is unlikely to be closer by month eleven.
For our own engine we can give the cost, because we measured it. Moving Tesseract Chrome up one Chrome major was a near-full rebuild of 93 minutes on our build machine. The slow part of a release is the checking afterwards: whether every profile still reads as the Chrome it claims.
How Mosaic is billed
We do not sell a yearly plan. Pro is one plan at $49 a month, billed monthly, with no per-profile pricing, and you can try it free for 14 days. Profiles run on your own computer and cost us nothing to give away, so there is one plan and no tier to outgrow, and nothing to prepay against. The current numbers are on the pricing page, and how the field compares on features is in the best anti-detect browsers.
