At a glance
- Over 90%
- Of carrier claims filed through web automation
- Thousands
- Of carrier portal logins a day (1,000 to 1,500 for UPS alone)
- 4 to 5
- Vendors tried before Browserless
- About 10 min
- To get a new container running
- 2 people
- Own all of the data collection and claims automation
Overview
Intelligent Audit has been a Browserless customer for over a year, and we're really glad they are. Our call with Slava Rubin and Artur Muravev for this story was a lot of fun. Slava has a dry one-liner for every carrier. Artur writes the data scripts and keeps everyone's numbers honest.
Intelligent Audit is a freight audit and supply chain intelligence company. It sits between shippers and carriers like FedEx, UPS, and DHL. It downloads carrier invoices, turns them into something its customers can actually read, pays the carriers on their behalf, and files claims when a carrier gets it wrong: duplicate billing, lost shipments, charges that shouldn't be there.
Nearly all of that happens inside carrier web portals, because the carriers don't offer APIs for it. So Intelligent Audit logs in to those portals for thousands of customers, every day. Self-hosted Browserless is what gets its scripts through the front door, past the bot detection, the CAPTCHAs, and the multi-factor prompts.
The challenge
For years, Intelligent Audit's own scripts logged in to carrier portals without much fuss. Then COVID hit. "After COVID, surprise, everybody decided to start using Cloudflare," Slava said. "They started catching bots, and we started struggling a little bit. We did our own tricks. It was kind of tough to get through, but we were managing it. And then the bot catchers became more and more sophisticated."
Their volume made it harder. A few logins here and there don't bother anyone. Intelligent Audit logs in thousands of times a day, and detection systems flag that almost immediately.
The problem landed on two people. Slava had been with the company almost from the start and designed most of its claims automation, but his job was IT, not code. Artur was the one engineer fighting the logins, and he was stuck. Everyone kept coming to Slava for answers he didn't have, so he started teaching himself to program.
Late data costs money. If invoice data arrives late, processing runs late, and customers can face penalties from carriers. When a portal goes down, a subcontracted team has to download invoices by hand until the automation is back.
Why self-hosted
Intelligent Audit holds its customers' carrier logins and banking details. With that access, someone could reroute a shipment or pay for someone else's freight. Some of its customers are banks, and their security policies apply too.
We're working with banks, so we have to follow their security policies. In other words, we cannot have data go anywhere.
Slava put it more simply, too: "It's like me asking you, give me your password to your bank account, your phone bill. And we actually have that. So we have to keep as much as we can in house."
That ruled out most of the market. Slava tried four or five vendors. Some wanted software installed on Intelligent Audit's machines. Others were cloud services that route traffic through infrastructure the customer can't see. Browserless was different: "It allowed for us to get a container. In other words, have everything in-house so we control the data flow, as opposed to a cloud-based system where we're sending the stream to nowhere land."
Slava found Browserless while searching for ways to handle CAPTCHAs and bot detection, through one of our conference talks on YouTube. He started on the free tier, using test logins he made just for the trial so no customer data was involved. He was learning to code at the same time. "I learned programming as I was figuring out Browserless," he told us.
That trial was enough to convince the rest of the team. Intelligent Audit now runs the Browserless Enterprise Docker image on its own infrastructure. In Slava's words, "Everybody was either questionably secure, unsecure, or just completely out there, and the configuration was way too overcomplicated. Browserless gave us basically the simplest solution at the fastest time."
How it works
Browserless handles the login. Intelligent Audit's scripts use BrowserQL to get through bot detection, CAPTCHAs, and multi-factor pauses, then save the session cookies and reuse them for hours of work in the company's own systems. Artur estimates UPS alone takes 1,000 to 1,500 logins a day, with about five sessions running around the clock.
The team sets its own upgrade pace. It tests a new container on a few workflows before rolling it out, and it usually has several container versions running side by side, because a new browser version can change how a carrier portal behaves. Slava thinks the container from his original free trial might still be running somewhere.
Slava has heard "easy to use" from plenty of vendors, and he was skeptical.
Those words are being thrown around way too lightly. It's easy to use for you because it's your system. But when you have to integrate it with somebody else, it's never that easy. In your case, it was actually that easy. We downloaded a container and just wrote a few lines of code, and here you go. We're up and running.
When UPS added CAPTCHAs to its login page, Intelligent Audit turned on Browserless CAPTCHA solving. Browserless had already passed the company's security review, so there was no new vendor to vet. "If we decided to go the route of buying a CAPTCHA service, there's way too many of them out there, and we need a lot of permissions from the security team to even look into that stuff," Slava said. "With Browserless it's a lot simpler, because you were already approved by our security team."
Results
Over 90% of Intelligent Audit's claims are filed through web automation, and the login layer underneath holds up at a volume bot detection is built to catch.
The part both of them wanted to talk about was support. When a carrier changes its defenses, our engineers work on Intelligent Audit's own scripts instead of sending a docs link. When Akamai started blocking logins, we shipped a new container with a workaround, and the team had it running in about ten minutes. One fix that took a developer three or four days to work out, our team turned around in about half an hour.
You guys actually spend time trying to help us debug our own code, and actually provide us snippets of code or a complete product. I'll be honest, I've never seen anybody do that.
Slava calls it a mutually beneficial relationship, and we'd agree. Some of the problems they've brought us, like sessions getting kicked out halfway through with no warning, were ones our team hadn't run into before. Working through them with Slava and Artur has made the product better.
Asked to sum it up, Slava kept it short: "You'll get the best support there is." Artur agreed: "Easy to use, friendly support. We really found out what friendly support is."
What's next
The carriers keep moving, and they tend to move together. "FedEx and UPS are like two brothers," Slava said. "One creates a headache, and the other one follows right after."
UPS rolled out multi-factor and then CAPTCHAs. FedEx is starting to follow. Intelligent Audit expects more changes, and we're glad to be the team they call when the next one lands. Thanks to Slava and Artur for the time and the stories.
Keep browser automation inside your network
Intelligent Audit runs Browserless on its own infrastructure, so customer credentials and carrier data never leave its control.