Show HN: Portal (SPC F25) – Try products with browser session sandboxes

5 points

3 months ago

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/try

Instead 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 limits

In 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 slack

Docs: 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/portal

Curious 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!