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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.

Other launches for this product

Same idea, different domain

Nobody's really built a dev tools tool for Sales yet.