holy crap - our company needs basically exactly this for a crazy feature our PM cooked up and we were gonna build something similar ourselves - this will save us so much time

Browserless can do this for free:

docker run -p 3000:3000 browserless/chrome:latest

Sounds like this does a lot more than simply take a screenshot. It mentions removing cookie banners, ads, etc. which is an always moving target.

If you have one, very narrow specific use case, then maybe that’s not so bad. But sounds like a huge pain if you need that for any arbitrary site.

> Sounds like this does a lot more than simply take a screenshot. It mentions removing cookie banners, ads, etc. which is an always moving target.

Oh okay so it does:

chrome --load-extension=path/to/ublock --headless --screenshot https://website.com

Couldn't this be done with a headless Firefox and adblocker extensions?

Feels like Dropbox comment.

I’m sure it could be. Just like I could bake an apple pie by first sowing wheat and planting apple trees.

Browserless is not free for commercial use.

> instead of managing browser clusters, and handling all the corner cases

The cost with running a docker container is you have to manage that container. You’re paying with dev time not money.

Exactly this. We keep forgetting time and money that needs to be paid to a developer to setup and manage stuff.

I cant edit the above post but follow that command with a request for a screenshot like so:

    curl -X POST http://localhost:3000/screenshot \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://example.com"}' \
  --output screenshot.png

And what commands do I run if I want to do 100 screenshots per second?

Not arguing as a part of this thread but as an aside.

Can chrome even take 100 screenshots a second? What would be the max? I think it's interesting.

Yeah that's basically just a 100 FPS video at that point lol

Well, for some users and uses, it's free. It seems they consider their small amount glue between docker and chrome a to be of commercial value. Still better than the original.

https://github.com/browserless/browserless/blob/main/LICENSE

Wondering what his monthly profit is if that’s not too personal, MRR doesn’t really tell me anything when I don’t know operating costs IMO.

He builds it in public so maybe you can find more details on his X profile. Last time he shared the server cost was about $5k/mo https://x.com/dmytrokrasun/status/1917817087461933560?s=46

Dug around their twitter a bit and they mentioned at one point having $14K MRR and $4K expenses

I spent a lot on servers. Around $5500 all monthly expenses.

MRR?

Monthly Recurring Revenue

> Turn Websites Into Screenshots with a simple API

If anyone wants to build “turn websites into APIs” and do it really well like OP, feel free to hmu.

Highly experienced full-stack and rust developer with experience at startups, G and Google X.

It's a good idea. Lately I've been building many android apps in kotlin that all just use web scraping instead of REST APIs.

So if you want, "turn your website into an app", that would be interesting.

This is awesome. wondering how would a company like this build a user base? Any ideas / speculation would be appreciated!

It was unimaginably tough. If I were to start again, I wouldn’t do it. I would choose a much easier niche.

SEO, social media and other channels. I spent a lot of time on all of that.

What would be an easier niche in your opinion?

Following the journey from the beginning

Such a great product. Happy customer since years!

Thank you!

Thanks for BoltAI as well, by the way.

Thank you

Does he manage his own automated browsers? I suppose this could simply be a wrapper for something like Scrapfly (or Scraping Bee or Zen Rows or many others), with some custom JS injected to remove banners.

I managed my own cluster.

I didn’t consider wrapping any service.

What needed for scraping is a bit different for what needed to screenshot websites.

I need to have full control over my cluster to guarantee the best possible quality.

It is great!

I signed up on my phone and tested in the playground.

It will fit perfectly into my workflow. I'm building a hyper-local directory site.

Getting good images for businesses is hard, so I'll use this to grab an image of their site as a place holder.

I can also add it to my AI workflow where I pass a website to OpenAI Assistant to extract data. OpenAI s not as robust with URLs as it is with images or PDFs. Often it won't visit then URL.

I can use this to get an image or pdf, pass it on and ask for the data back. OpenAI is better with files than URLs in my experience.

Good job!

Well done!

Don't you get problems with cloudflare blocking your browsers?

Thanks for the mention, my friend!