Executive Summary

Many engineering, QA and automation teams still wrestle with Selenium’s complexity, brittle WebDriver abstractions, and high infrastructure/maintenance costs—pain points that matter across roughly 500,000 teams responsible for test automation, scraping and RPA (a $6.0B market at ~$12K ACV per team). These issues slow delivery, inflate costs, and push teams to hack around failures instead of shipping features. You could build a lightweight platform that replaces Selenium with direct browser-native control (CDP and equivalents), helpful browser extensions, and a managed control plane (MCP) that provides serverless execution, pay-as-you-go orchestration, and AI-assisted script generation and self-healing. The product would prioritize reliability, low operational overhead, and a developer-first DX that gets teams from zero to stable scripts quickly. This is an attractive moment: browsers are standardizing around native control protocols and cloud/serverless execution is becoming the norm, so the timing aligns with an estimated market score of 88/100 and revenue potential of 82/100. There’s real demand for lower-cost, less brittle automation that integrates with modern CI/CD and observability stacks. You can differentiate on practical metrics—lower flakiness, reduced infra spend, faster time-to-script—while offering a managed service that competes on ease-of-use rather than raw feature parity with Selenium ecosystems. Be upfront about challenges: browser compatibility, security sandboxing, and incumbent inertia in teams familiar with Selenium are real hurdles, but with a focused product and strong DX this idea has clear legs given a medium competition landscape.

Market Opportunity

Replace Selenium with CDP, browser extensions, and MCP for lightweight automation targets a $6.0B = 500,000 engineering and automation teams × $12K ACV (covers test automation, scraping, and RPA orchestration spend) total addressable market with medium saturation and a year-over-year growth rate of 10-12% YoY (Gartner and IDC estimates for test automation and RPA convergence, 2023-2026).

Key trends driving demand: Standardization around browser-native control protocols (CDP and equivalents) — creates an opportunity to build tools that talk directly to browsers and avoid WebDriver complexity.; Shift to hosted infrastructure and serverless execution for browser workloads — reduces operational burden and enables pay-as-you-go automation.; AI-assisted test and script generation — lowers the time-to-script for complex flows and enables self-healing, making automation accessible to non-developers.; Convergence of QA, RPA, and scraping use cases — multiplies addressable use cases for a single automation platform that supports assertions, data extraction, and task orchestration..

Key competitors include Playwright, Puppeteer, BrowserStack, Apify.

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Replace Selenium with CDP, browser extensions, and MCP for lightweight automation

Executive Summary

Market Validation

Market Opportunity

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