How to Automate the ChatGPT & Gemini Web UIs Without an API Key

You've got a folder of a few hundred screenshots and you want the text out of each one. Or you want to generate a batch of images for a side project. Or you just want to drop a single "summarize this" call into a script you're writing on a Sunday afternoon. So you open the pricing page for the official API, do the math on per-token billing plus setting up keys and a payment method, and it's hard to justify, because the exact same model will do the exact same thing for free in a browser tab. There are really two ways to get a model like ChatGPT or Gemini to do work for you. The web UI is free, or already covered by a subscription you're paying for anyway, but you drive it by hand. The API is scriptable, but you pay by the token. Most of the time that trade-off is fine. But for a whole category of work like hobby projects, throwaway scripts, research, or anything that doesn't need production-grade reliability, you're stuck picking between "free but manual" and "automated but paid." Which raises the obvious question: why not automate the free web UI? It's just a webpage. You open it, type in the box, click send. It turns out that hides a few fiddly problems, which I ran into enough times that I eventually built a small library for them. In this article we'll work through what it takes to automate these UIs, and at the end I'll show how little code it comes down to. 1. What it takes to drive a chat UI A single round trip with ChatGPT or Gemini breaks down into four jobs: Get your text into the input box Optionally attach a file Wait for the model to finish answering And read the answer back out. Every one of these is harder than it sounds, because the page is a modern single-page app that was never built to be driven by a script. We'll use Selenium with undetected-chromedriver, and for now assume the browser is already open (we'll get to launching it in the next section). To keep the code readable I'll show whichever of the two platforms makes each problem clearest, and