Browser automation agent for $0: playwright + browser-use, wired together in an afternoon

I needed an agent that could navigate a government procurement portal, find awarded contracts matching certain criteria, extract the key fields, and dump them to a spreadsheet — automatically, every morning. The portal has no API, no data export, just an old HTML table with pagination.

I spent an afternoon wiring together two free listings from ai-supply.store and it now runs unattended.

The listings

• playwright-browser-automation — headless browser control; reliable, fast, great async support
• browser-use-web-agent — LLM-driven web agent layer; turns natural-language instructions into Playwright actions

Both free to install from the catalog. For anything doing browser automation I always check the security scan for unexpected egress patterns — both were clean.

The setup

from browser_use import Agent
from browser_use.browser.browser import Browser, BrowserConfig
from langchain_community.llms import Ollama  # free local LLM

browser = Browser(config=BrowserConfig(headless=True))
llm = Ollama(model="llama3.2:3b")  # running locally via ollama listing

agent = Agent(
    task="""
    Go to https://procurement.example.gov/awards.
    Find all contracts awarded in the last 7 days with value > £50,000.
    Extract: award date, supplier name, contract value, description.
    Return as a JSON array.
    """,
    llm=llm,
    browser=browser
)

async def run():
    result = await agent.run()
    return result

What it actually does

The browser-use layer uses the LLM to reason about the current DOM, decide which elements to interact with, handle pagination, and extract structured data. It's not brittle XPath scraping — it adapts when the page layout shifts slightly.

I run this on a VPS on a cron job. The LLM reasoning happens locally via Ollama so there's no API cost even for the intelligence layer.

The combination of Playwright's reliability and browser-use's LLM steering is genuinely powerful. Both listings are in the agentic category — worth exploring if you have any browser automation needs.