Portal (SPC F25)
Try products with browser session sandboxes
Details
- External ID
- 47340686
- Source
- HN
- Company
- —
- Product
- Portal (SPC F25)
- Website domain
- makeportals.com
- Launched
- March 11, 2026
- Cohort
- —
- Upvotes
- 5
- Upvotes percentile
- 0.1070110701107011
- Tags
- —
- Fetched at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
- Updated at
- Sept. 7, 2026, 9:26 p.m.
Description
Hey HN, I'm Zach, founder of Portal. Portal lets you share a live sandbox browser session as a link.Try it here: https://www.makeportals.com/tryInstead of asking someone to sign up, install software, or book a demo for user research, onboarding, or sales, you send a link and they interact with the real product in a sandboxed browser environment, then you get session replays.Each viewer gets a fresh remote browser instance that starts from a defined state (URL, cookies, extensions, local files, etc). Sessions are isolated and expire automatically.The sessions have configurable guardrails: - disabling buttons - restricting URLs - API rate limits - Time limitsIn Watch Mode, an AI Agent with contextual awareness clicks through a demo and explains the product. In Play Mode, users explore a guardrailed session while the AI answers questions.Portal came from trying to get feedback on a chrome extension I’d built to help people with disabilities control gmail with voice. People were cautious to download it & I kept wishing I could send a browser session with the extension already installed to try safely & an AI to explain async.Portal grew out of that idea: share an exact browser state where your product works without requiring installs or already logged into demo accounts.Some early uses: - Getting user feedback on local projects in Claude Code with a temporary links/rate limits - Helping onboard to high friction/integration products like extension/add-ons or code reviewers - Replacing inbound product demos in sales for SMBs by embedding on landing pages or sending to prospects with the AI agent self-serve created - Ending live presentations with a QR code open to a live product environment - PMs sharing prototype links for feedback in slackDocs: https://www.makeportals.com/docs/mcp Try in Claude Code: claude mcp add --transport http portal https://mcp-portal-sogv.onrender.com/mcp OpenClaw: https://clawhub.ai/Zach213/portalCurious about the browser sessions you’d want to share w/ an AI guide- we’re improving latency of interaction every week & think stateful URLs/shareable product states are the future. Love any feedback as we're early!
Enrichment
- Theme
- browser automation and scraping for AI
- Vertical
- Horizontal
- Function
- Dev tools
- Audience
- Developer
- AI stance
- Not AI
- Project type
- Commercial product
- Normalized one-liner
- sandboxed browser environment for testing products safely
- Manually corrected
- False
Could you build this?
No Providing instant, isolated cloud VM sandboxes with browser-based interactive streaming, secure secret injection, live rate-limiting proxies, and session recording requires massive multi-tenant virtualization and streaming infrastructure.
What it would actually take: Requires microVM orchestration (e.g., AWS Firecracker or Nomad/Fly.io machines) spinning up ephemeral environments in sub-seconds. The stack needs WebRTC/VNC or reverse-proxy tunneling for low-latency browser streaming, kernel-level isolation (cgroups, namespaces), and secure secret boundary management.
Discussion
No comments on this launch.
Competitors
Other products that read as similar to this one — 52 launches clear the similarity bar, closest 8 shown.
Attention rank: #50 of 53 (itself plus its competitors, highest first — normalized so YC and Product Hunt are compared fairly).
Launched 127 days after the earliest competitor.
- ContextFort · hn · 2026-01-14 · 14 upvotes · similarity 0.45
- Supafork · hn · 2026-09-01 · 15 upvotes · similarity 0.43
- Making Claude Code sessions link-shareable · hn · 2026-01-17 · 8 upvotes · similarity 0.41
- A better way to handoff web bugs to AI agents · hn · 2025-11-25 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.40
- Claude-replay · hn · 2026-03-02 · 5 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- Portal · ph · 2026-09-17 · 72 upvotes · similarity 0.39
- We built a way for Claude Code to join meetings like a real teammate · hn · 2026-04-23 · 10 upvotes · similarity 0.38
- bunflared · github · 2026-09-25 · 39 upvotes · similarity 0.38
Other launches for this product
- No other launches for this product.
Same idea, different domain
Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.