Ask HN: Is there a market for a Screenshot capture service?

1 pointswebvet12y ago4 comments

We needed to capture screenshots of some 50k+ URLs for one of our proprietary projects. After looking high and low, we found many services - some offered totally free usage while others offered (free +) paid plans.

On further study, we found that most of the free services were either defunct/broken or very restrictive and only the paid/commercial ones were going to be any good.

While exploring third-party solutions, we were also working on a roll-our-own hack which, eventually, came about quite nice recently.

At this point, I'm wondering if it would be worth while to launch a service of our own.

All comments, questions, ideas, suggestions etc. welcomed. :)

4 comments

3 comments · 1 top-level

StavrosK12y ago· 2 in thread

What's wrong with the already-existing commercial ones?

webvetOP12y ago

Nothing that we'd really know of, because we never actually used any. :)

Having said that, I must admit that we did study the specs of some of those and found a few gaps here and there (at least so far as our requirement was concerned).

To list a few off the top of my head:

1) Returning of http response codes 2) Following 300 class redirects 3) Control over exact pixel size of the images etc.

StavrosK12y ago

Why didn't you use them? A few missing features don't justify launching a whole new service, as the existing ones can just add the features in a day or so.

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