An anti-detect browser's daily launch limit caps how many times a day you can open a profile's browser, whatever the plan says about how many profiles you may keep. Take a free plan with 500 profiles and 30 launches a day. If every profile gets equal use, each one opens about once every 17 days. The headline number is the size of the cupboard. The launch cap is how often you can open the door.
Three meters, and only one of them is on the front of the page
Anti-detect browser pricing meters one of three things. Most plans count profiles that exist. Some count browsers open at the same moment, which we went through in paying per open browser. Free plans with large profile numbers usually count a third thing: launches, per day, sometimes with a small fee for each one above the allowance.
The three are not interchangeable, and the generous one on a pricing page is often not the one that binds. A plan that says 500 profiles and 30 launches a day is a 30-launch plan for anyone who opens each profile more than about twice a month. The profile figure only matters for libraries that are mostly asleep.
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.
Do the division before you compare plans
The useful number is how many different profiles you can keep in active use. Work it out like this:
- Count the profiles you open on a normal working day, and how many times each.
- Multiply. That is your daily launch need.
- Compare it with the cap. If you are over, the cap is your real plan size, whatever the profile count says.
- If the plan charges for launches above the cap, multiply the excess by the fee and by the working days in a month.
A worked example, with round numbers. An agency opens 40 client profiles twice a day, morning and afternoon. That is 80 launches a day, against a cap of 30. On a plan that charges a cent for each launch above the cap, the 50 extra launches cost 50 cents a day, about $11 over 22 working days. Cheap, until the agency adds automation.
When you lay two or three plans side by side, put these columns in your own spreadsheet:
| Column | What to read off the vendor's page |
|---|---|
| Profiles kept | the number on the plan |
| Launches per day | the cap, and when the day resets |
| Fee above the cap | per launch, and whether it is billed or blocked |
| Your launches per day | step 2 above |
| Profiles you can really use | cap divided by launches per profile |
The last column is the one that tells plans apart. Two plans with the same profile count can differ tenfold in it.
What counts as a launch is the fine print
A launch cap is only as fair as its counting rules, and those are rarely on the pricing page. Five questions decide whether 30 a day means 30 sessions of work:
- Does a launch from the API or a script count the same as one by hand?
- Does a launch that fails, because the proxy is down or the browser crashes, still use one up?
- Does a warm-up or background run count?
- When does the day reset, and in whose timezone?
- Above the cap, is the next launch refused, or charged?
The second question matters most for anyone with residential proxies. A session that reaches nothing is a routine event on a residential pool, and if every failed open costs a launch, a bad proxy morning eats the allowance before any work is done. In Mosaic a profile does not open behind a proxy that has not answered and tunnelled. The check runs first, and a dead proxy is refused with a reason instead of opening a browser that cannot reach anything.
Who a daily launch limit suits, and who it punishes
A launch-capped free plan suits a large library opened rarely: a seller keeping a profile per dormant store, a researcher with a profile per region who checks each once a month. For them, 500 profiles at 30 launches is a real offer.
It punishes anything that opens browsers in a loop. A test suite that signs thirty users in on every build, a script that checks forty client pages each morning, a warm-up that browses each new profile a few times before it is used: each of those spends launches the way a person never would. The per-launch fee was small in the worked example above because people open browsers slowly. Scripts do not.
Why Mosaic does not meter launches
A profile in Mosaic runs on your computer, with your memory and your CPU. Opening it costs us nothing, so charging per open would be charging for your own machine. Pro is $49 a month, with a 14-day free trial, and has no profile tiers, no concurrency tiers and no launch meter. Free is 3 profiles and 10 profile creations, and a Free profile has no daily count on how often it opens. The plans are on the pricing page.
Why other vendors price per profile at all, and what it costs them to host each one, is in why anti-detect browsers cost what they cost. If you are still deciding what kind of tool you need, what an anti-detect browser is starts from the beginning.
