How Browser Infrastructure Became Chronicle Legal's Competitive Moat

Chronicle Legal has revolutionized how disability attorneys manage and analyze evidence from government portals. By leveraging Browserbase's headless browser infrastructure, Chronicle transformed a tedious self-hosted, and breakable solution to a scalable platform serving firms with thousands of active cases, all while maintaining a lean operation.

Antiquated government systems 🤝 modern legal needs

Disability attorneys represent clients seeking Social Security disability benefits. Their firms manage hundreds to thousands of active cases simultaneously, each lasting an average of 18 months - this comes with a unique operational challenge.

The core problem lies in how evidence and case updates are delivered. The government provides crucial information through an antiquated portal called ERE, but offers no notifications or automated updates. Attorneys must manually check each case daily, logging into the portal and reviewing tables of documents, evidence, and notices to identify new information. Their only other alternative is … to wait for the mail. These professionals thus must spend excessive time on these administrative tasks rather than on case preparation.

"The average firm has 200 active cases at any time, but some of our firms have 6,000 cases," explains Nikhil Pai, founder of Chronicle. "It was never possible for firms to actually do this level of monitoring. They would always wait for the mail, which would get lost or delayed, causing them to miss deadlines."

Chronicle's initial solution & its challenge

Chronicle wanted to develop a comprehensive platform that automated the entire evidence monitoring and analysis process. Nikhil initially tried to build the browser infrastructure required for this automation from scratch. However, he learned early on that it would not be a viable long term solution.

Initially, this workflow was built using a self-hosted Selenium Grid setup. Nikhil built his own browser infrastructure using Celery workers managing Selenium Grid. He ran his own hardware and needed to monitor instances, and the task queue, and had to deal with memory management and CPU management. With the first handful of customers, it worked well enough.

But as Chronicle grew, Nikhil knew that this was untenable. Even with 20 customers, Chronicle would be running a couple hundred sessions a day, quickly forcing him into daily "infrastructure babysitting."

The rigid one-to-one worker-to-browser architecture meant that if 10 browsers were running but 5 crashed, his effective capacity dropped by half, creating hours-long backlogs.

"I was constantly checking: Is Selenium running? Do I have enough browsers?" Pai recalls. Each new client required manually provisioning containers and monitoring memory usage. Worse, the system lacked stealth capabilities - a ticking time bomb as government portals inevitably added bot detection.

The infrastructure demands were consuming increasing amounts of his time, preventing focus on core product development.

Enter → Browserbase

Having struggled with his own infrastructure for months, the promise of managed browser infrastructure was immediately compelling. The migration proved transformative. Nikhil took the opportunity to modernize his entire stack and the Browserbase API replaced his complex container orchestration entirely.

The change was immediate and dramatic. No more manual browser management. No more capacity planning. No more hung browsers derailing operations. "Now I can just pay you guys more money and get more browsers," Pai explains.

If he needed 50 workers instantly, 50 browsers were ready and available.

The reliability improvement was equally striking. Professional-grade infrastructure meant consistent uptime, with only one outage experienced since adoption. Built-in stealth capabilities provided future-proofing against evolving government security measures. Most importantly, Nikhil could finally focus on what mattered: building his core product and growing the business instead of babysitting infrastructure.

Now? Scaling to enterprise levels with a lean operation

This has saved me at least a month’s worth of time to set up our own infrastructure to make it more robust. But really, it’s hard to measure peace of mind. The key is that I no longer have to think about this.

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

1. Business Impact

• Competitive Advantage: Superior browser infrastructure became a key differentiator, enabling service levels that competitors couldn't match. "My competitor without Browserbase is not able to achieve the service level I can because they don't have the browser infrastructure," Nikhil explains
• Unlimited and Automatic Scaling: No more manual browser management. This allows taking on larger clients without infrastructure concerns
• Service Reliability: Chronicle no longer worries about browser infrastructure reliability & the elimination of browser maintenance overhead
• Lean operation: Browserbase enabled to handle enterprise-level workloads without adding DevOps or infrastructure engineering roles.

2. Development Efficiency

• Months of development time saved: Avoided building robust scaling architecture that may or may not have worked
• Peace of Mind: No longer worrying about browser infrastructure reliability
• Focus on Core Product: More time spent on AI features and user experience
• Future-Proofing: Built-in capabilities like stealth mode provide protection against evolving technical challenges in government portal automation

Why Browserbase over others?

Browserbase’s differentiators came down to integrations, cost, and developer experience.

"Nothing I could find easily plugged into having your own Playwright code," Pai explains. "Other options required using their proprietary language or being locked into their ecosystem. I already had most of the code in place, so it wasn't worth rewriting everything."

Browserbase's competitive pricing model aligned with Chronicle Legal's bootstrap, single-founder approach while providing enterprise-grade capabilities. This plan also includes direct access to the Browserbase team and responsive support has been crucial for a developer managing a complex technical product.

Build your own enterprise grade solution

Chronicle's story demonstrates how Browserbases’s modern infrastructure services enable lean teams to build and scale enterprise-grade solutions.

"Without a tool like Browserbase, it would have been very difficult to scale the business while staying as a single person. The fact that I can run 100,000 sessions per month is not possible with my own architecture. Browserbase enabled me to make browser reliability and scale a unique selling point of my product."

- Nikhil Pai, Founder

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