

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

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.<p>On further study, we found that most of the free services were either defunct&#x2F;broken or very restrictive and only the paid&#x2F;commercial ones were going to be any good.<p>While exploring third-party solutions, we were also working on a roll-our-own hack which, eventually, came about quite nice recently.<p>At this point, I&#x27;m wondering if it would be worth while to launch a service of our own.<p>All comments, questions, ideas, suggestions etc. welcomed. :)
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StavrosK
What's wrong with the already-existing commercial ones?

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webvet
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.

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StavrosK
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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webvet
The primary reason we didn't use them was the lack of several features we
needed.

We're not really concerned about the existing services adding the missing
features - what we really wish to find out is whether or not there exist (at
least a decent sized) market for such a service.

