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Comment by longnguyen

7 days ago

My friend Dmytro[0] has been running a screenshot API called ScreenshotOne[1]. He's been building it solo and has reached $20K MRR recently.

[0]: https://x.com/DmytroKrasun

[1]: https://screenshotone.com

38 comments

longnguyen

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merek  7 days ago

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.

  • krasun  6 days ago

    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.

    • osullip  6 days ago

      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!

gervwyk  7 days ago

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

  • krasun  6 days ago

    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.

yapyap  7 days ago

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.

throwaway106382  7 days ago

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

  • Lord_Zero  7 days ago

    Browserless can do this for free:

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

    • nkrisc  7 days ago

      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.

      4 replies →

    • sjducb  7 days ago

      > 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.

      1 reply →

    • Lord_Zero  7 days ago

      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

      3 replies →

geiger01  7 days ago

I also have a similar api Screenshot api and web scraping api

https://capturekit.dev

  • leoh  7 days ago

    > 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.

    • sureglymop  6 days ago

      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.