Vivian Health runs a job board for healthcare professionals, primarily travel nurses working temporary contracts across the U.S. Their recruiters generate “submission packets” (multi-page resumes and supporting documents) on demand as part of the application process.
Vivian Health has used Browserless since roughly 2020–2021 to power this PDF workflow at scale.
Before Browserless, Vivian Health generated PDFs using a self-managed Chromium + Puppeteer setup bundled directly into their Node.js backend.
At the time, their platform ran on Heroku with limited infrastructure flexibility, which created a few pain points:
- Overprovisioned instances: Their Heroku dynos had to be scaled to the largest available size in order to create resource headroom for both the web server and Chromium to operate in parallel.
- Slow boot times and operational friction: To reduce deployment size and conform with platform limits, they had to download the Chrome binary at boot, which increased startup time and slowed down the iteration cycle.
- Resource contention and risk: Spikes in PDF demand or general unpredictability with Chromium processes could push memory to 100% or otherwise overconsume available resources, impacting availability of the API processes that shared the instance and leading to adverse impact on core functionality unrelated to PDFs.
Even after moving away from that Heroku-era setup, Vivian Health wanted to avoid building and maintaining a dedicated browser fleet themselves and instead focus their time on solving the problems core to their business and mission.
Vivian Health started with an on-demand Browserless plan and a straightforward migration path:
- They were able to swap their puppeteer package to puppeteer-core and point at Browserless (via the remote endpoint) with minimal code changes.
- They later migrated to Browserless’s **HTTP **/pdf API, which matched their core need: send HTML in → get a rendered PDF back, without needing to manage browser control logic.
Today, Vivian Health uses the PDF API pretty much exclusively to generate recruiter-triggered submission packets built from candidate profile data and staffing requirements.
As their needs grew, they incrementally scaled capacity inside Browserless over time, and eventually moved to an enterprise setup with a dedicated fleet and fixed annual price.
Scaled output without re-architecting the workflow
Vivian Health estimates they grew from roughly ~100,000 PDFs/month early on to millions of PDFs/month today, without needing a major overhaul of their PDF generation system, scaling capacity instead as demand increased.
Fast generation times at business-traffic peaks
Because recruiters drive generation during working hours, peak demand happens when U.S. time zones overlap. Vivian Health reports:
Vivian Health’s infrastructure team is small so offloading browser operations to Browserless helped them focus on the “lower level stuff” they can’t offload, like database performance and general scaling issues.
Vivian Health described savings primarily in engineering time/headcount: what they pay for Browserless “is probably saving us… a good chunk of an engineer’s salary” worth of time that would otherwise be spent maintaining and worrying about Chrome/PDF workloads.
Vivian Health described Browserless support as responsive, early on even chatting directly with Browserless leadership, and today receiving quick responses via in-app support.
Beyond PDFs, Vivian Health is experimenting with additional browser workflows as they explore AI-assisted experiences for recruiters and healthcare professionals, using remote browser sessions in early funnel checks and combining Browserless with other tools for AI-oriented browser control.
Vivian Health’s approach shows how teams can smoothly scale high-volume, on-demand browser workflows without re-architecting existing systems or taking on the operational complexity of maintaining a browser fleet.
If you’re running business-critical, on-demand workflows that need to stay fast and reliable as volume grows, Browserless can help. Get in touch to learn more.