5 Hours to 15 Minutes: How Benny Eliminated Automation Maintenance Overhead

Benny has revolutionized how food stamp recipients access deals and manage their finances. By leveraging Browserbase's headless browser infrastructure and Stagehand's AI-powered automation, Benny transformed a maintenance-heavy scripting nightmare to a self-healing platform that allows it to onboard new grocery merchants in a day instead of weeks..

Financial data without APIs

Benny serves the 42 million Americans who receive SNAP benefits (food stamps) by allowing them to link their grocery loyalty accounts (Walmart, Kroger, H-E-B, and more) to earn unique brand deals and promotions. The core challenge lies in accessing data that traditionally doesn't have APIs, like merchant loyalty accounts that Benny needs to sync users' purchase history to deliver personalized promotions. This requires constant browser automation across dozens of different merchant portals, each with unique authentication flows and data structures.

"Our core competency is financial services, so we're really appreciative of Browserbase that allows us to abstract away the difficulties of getting data that traditionally doesn't have APIs," explains Steve, CTO and co-founder of Benny.

Benny's initial attempts

Like many others, Benny initially tried building their own browser automation infrastructure from scratch. The team started with AWS Lambda, attempting to host Chromium directly while patching together various tools and managing their own proxy providers. This approach quickly proved untenable for an engineering team focused on financial services innovation. The team then moved to another browser infrastructure company, but found the platform lacking in key areas. "We just didn't find that they were keeping up to date in terms of observability, stealth capabilities, and tooling that Browserbase offers, plus transparency around pricing," Steve recalls. But the real problem wasn't just infrastructure - it was maintenance, and therefore, time. Benny relied heavily on brittle Playwright scripts with complex retry workflows. When pages changed slightly, workflows would fail, requiring engineers to investigate, fix, and restart processes. This created a vicious cycle where customer-facing engineers were constantly pulled away from core product work to patch up automation scripts.

"Engineers weren't happy because this pulled them away from their core project work. Customers weren't happy because data was delayed," Steve explains.

The traditional solution for companies in Benny's space would be hiring a dedicated team focused solely on browser automation scripts. But Benny knew there was another solution.

The Browserbase + Stagehand combo

The migration to Browserbase provided immediate infrastructure reliability, but the real transformation came with Stagehand's AI-powered automation capabilities. Instead of writing and maintaining brittle Playwright scripts, Benny could now leverage AI agents that adapt to page changes automatically. The change was dramatic and immediate! Instead of complex forking logic to handle different page renderings for different customers, Stagehand's AI could analyze pages dynamically and extract the needed data regardless of layout variations. What previously required extensive scripting now worked with simple prompts and extraction logic.

"We frankly barely write any traditional Playwright scripts at all now," Steve explains. "Before, data extraction required looking at all possible page combinations and writing tons of forking logic - a total mess to write and maintain. Now we can spin up a new merchant link quite quickly, release to production quickly, and it's largely issue-free from the get-go."

The reliability improvement was equally striking. Professional infrastructure management combined with self-healing AI automation meant consistent uptime and minimal manual intervention. Most importantly, Benny's engineers could focus on building financial services features instead of debugging web scraping scripts.

Now Benny can scale financial data access with a lean team

"We were going to hire a full-time engineer to manage all of this, and we're not now because of Browserbase and Stagehand."

The impact of migrating to Browserbase has driven market expansion and saved developer time.

Engineering time saved

• 4-5 hours to 15 minutes weekly: Maintenance time per script dropped from 4-5 hours weekly across a 4-person engineering team to just 15 minutes
• 1-2 weeks to 1 day: New merchant onboarding time reduced by 90%
• 30 minutes to under 1 minute: Issue diagnosis time thanks to Browserbase's replay functionality and real-time observability
• Avoided additional hires: Eliminated need for dedicated infrastructure engineer whose sole job would have been to maintain their browser infrastructure
• Robust Data Extraction: Stagehand handles complex page variations and conditional logic automatically
• Scalable Architecture: Infrastructure that grows with business needs without proportional engineering overhead

Bottom line business impact

• Faster Market Expansion: Ability to quickly add new merchants and brands to the platform
• Improved Customer Experience: Consistent data synchronization without delays from broken scripts
• Engineering Focus: Team can concentrate on core financial services features instead of maintenance

AI-powered financial services & more

Benny's story demonstrates how AI-powered browser automation enables fintech companies to access critical data sources without building massive overhead. The combination of reliable infrastructure and intelligent automation creates a competitive advantage in markets where data access is traditionally complex and expensive.

As Benny prepares to launch more products in the market, Browserbase + Stagehand provides the foundation for rapid scaling.

"I love the product. Browserbase has allowed us to abstract away the difficulties of getting data that traditionally doesn't have APIs, and Stagehand has made our automation largely issue-free from the get-go." — Steve, CTO and Co-founder, Benny

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