FAQ

Clearcote is a privacy and automation tool intended for lawful purposes — protecting your own privacy, web/QA testing, research, accessibility and automation you are authorized to run. You are responsible for how you use it; respect website terms of service and applicable laws.

Clearcote controls browser fingerprint signals so a session presents one coherent, plausible identity. It is not marketed against, and does not target, any specific detection product, and it is not a guarantee of evading any system. Treat it as a privacy/identity-consistency tool and validate behavior yourself.

Those overwrite navigator properties at runtime with injected JavaScript, which is brittle and self-revealing. Clearcote changes the C++ engine, so values come from Chromium's own code paths — there's no injected layer to detect. See Architecture.

No tool is. Engine-level, coherent controls remove many common tells, but detection is an evolving space. Always validate your configuration against tools like CreepJS, BrowserScan and Pixelscan for your use case.

The browser itself does not phone home or update itself: telemetry and update beacons are removed. It contacts Google only when you use Google: on the licensed build since r53 Google is the default search engine, so a search from the address bar goes there, and help links open support.google.com. The SDK downloads the verified browser on first use — the open build from GitHub Releases, the licensed build from clearcotelabs.com — and auto_update / autoUpdate is opt-in. Without a key the SDK only contacts us if you ask for a specific version (it reads the public version catalog). With a licence key (the free key, Personal or Pro), each launch asks which build is current and checks a browser slot out — sending the key, a random machine id, your OS and the SDK and browser versions — keeps it alive while the browser runs and gives it back when it closes. From licensed r51 on Windows and Linux, each launch also fetches the signed identity for that browser from the Clearcote persona service (persona.clearcotelabs.com, with persona-us.clearcotelabs.com as the fallback); the open build never does. licenseThroughProxy sends the slot checkout, heartbeats and check-in through your proxy; the build lookup and the download still connect directly. geoip (on by default since SDK 0.66.0; it asks an IP-echo service for the exit IP) and widevine contact their own data sources.

Yes, for one browser at a time. Open Licenses in your dashboard and claim the free key in one of three ways: connect a GitHub account that is at least 30 days old, pass a card check (the card is never charged; prepaid cards are refused), or sign in with a company Google Workspace account (up to 3 claims per company domain every 30 days). You get the same licensed build as Pro — the newest Chromium, recorded human motion, the private stealth patches and the profile library. The key lasts 30 days and you renew it free from the same page. It needs SDK 0.30.0 or newer and always runs the latest build. See how licensed browsers are counted; Pro adds more browsers at once, version pinning and email support.

Windows x64 and Linux x64 — the SDK auto-downloads the right binary for your OS. On an Apple Silicon Mac (M1 or newer, macOS 13 or later) the licensed build runs natively as a preview: the SDK (0.51.1+) downloads it by itself when you launch with a licence key. The macOS build is a few revisions behind Windows and Linux. On an Intel Mac, or without a licence key, launch() runs the Clearcote Docker image through Docker Desktop and returns the same browser (SDK 0.40.0+). An open 150 build for Apple Silicon is on GitHub Releases (v0.1.0-pre.24) to run by hand; the SDK does not fetch it. The Profile Manager runs on Windows, Linux and macOS. See macOS.

Yes. Swap Playwright's launch for Clearcote's (from clearcote import launch / import { launch } from "clearcote") — it returns a normal Playwright browser. Puppeteer and other CDP clients connect to serve() / clearcote serve. You can also point executablePath at the open build directly; the licensed build only starts through the SDK. See Playwright & Puppeteer.

Use a different fingerprint seed per identity (e.g. derived from a tenant/account id) and a separate user-data dir per profile for cookies/storage. To serve several at once from one endpoint, clearcote serve starts a browser per identity, with each connection choosing its seed, proxy, timezone and language — see Deployment. The free key runs one browser at a time, Personal up to 15 and Pro up to 250 (more in blocks of 100); the open build has no limit.

The open build is — BSD-3-Clause, every patch human-readable, reproducible from source. Don't trust us, verify us. The licensed build (the free key, Personal and Pro) adds patches that aren't published, so it can't be rebuilt from public source; the open build gets each new Chromium major later.