Show HN: ScreenCraft – Screenshot and PDF API Without the Puppeteer Headaches
2 points
2 hours ago
| 1 comment
| screencraftapi.com
| HN
Hey HN,

I built a REST API for capturing screenshots and generating PDFs from URLs.

Why: I got tired of managing Puppeteer/Playwright in production. Memory leaks, zombie processes, Docker issues. So I wrapped it in an API.

  Stack:
  - Node.js + Fastify
  - Playwright (more stable than Puppeteer in my experience)
  - Self-hosted on Hetzner

  Features:
  - Screenshots: PNG, JPEG, WebP
  - PDFs: A4, Letter, custom sizes
  - Full-page capture, custom viewports
  - Cookie consent auto-accept
  - Lazy-load handling
API example:

      curl -X POST "https://www.screencraftapi.com/api/v1/screenshots" \
        -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" \
        -d '{"url": "https://example.com"}'

  Free tier: 250 requests/month
  Docs: https://www.screencraftapi.com/docs
Would love technical feedback. What's missing? What would make this useful for your projects?
cebert
2 hours ago
[-]
This is so trivial and easy to do with Playwright. I see this being a tough sell, especially to give a 3rd party visibility into the content you’re generating PDFs for. Good luck with your launch though.
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RobTheFrog
2 hours ago
[-]
what kind of API would you pay for?
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cebert
2 hours ago
[-]
I wouldn’t, but I can see people or businesses who would.
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RobTheFrog
2 hours ago
[-]
okai, thanks for your feedback specially the part with the privacy concerns totaly valid point, im going to display it better how screencraft handles it
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