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

1 points by webvet ↗ HN
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

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

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.
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.