u/Accurate-Interview92

We started testing repeated renders/caching this week and it honestly changed performance more than we expected.

A lot of pages people screenshot aren’t actually changing every second, but most APIs still fully re-render them every request. We noticed some URLs were getting hit dozens of times with the exact same viewport/settings.

So we tried:
same URL + same params + short time window = serve cached render instead of launching a fresh browser.

The speed difference was pretty noticeable, especially on heavier JS sites.

Still figuring out edge cases though:

• dynamic dashboards
• auth pages
• sites with delayed animations
• pages that partially update after initial load

The funny part is we originally built this because Puppeteer kept randomly ruining our weekends with memory spikes and broken renders 😅

Now we’re weirdly deep into browser pooling, wait strategies, caching layers, and trying to stop pages from exploding when a font CDN takes too long.

Curious what people here prioritize more in screenshot APIs:

• raw speed
• rendering accuracy
• anti-bot handling
• pricing
• PDF quality
• reliability over long runs

Feels like everyone values different things once they hit production scale.

Lastly, I would love to see other Dev try it and give their opinion so please reach out if you are interested in testing (Beta Version)

So I was messing around with generating screenshots/PDFs from websites for one of our side projects and honestly… dealing with Puppeteer in production was way more painful than we expected.

Cold starts, random crashes, pages loading weirdly, fonts breaking, memory issues, all the fun stuff.

We tried a few existing screenshot APIs too and they worked, but a lot felt either:

• too expensive at scale
• overly complicated
• or weirdly restrictive for simple use cases

So we started hacking together our own small API on Vercel just to make things easier for ourselves.

At first it was literally:
URL → screenshot → done.

But after testing it more we realized there’s actually a lot we could improve:

• smarter wait handling
• cleaner PDFs
• faster repeated screenshots through caching
• better dev experience/docs
• simpler API responses

Right now we’re mainly experimenting and seeing if this is useful outside our own projects.

Curious:
What’s the MOST annoying thing you’ve dealt with when generating screenshots/PDFs programmatically?

Would genuinely love to hear horror stories before we keep improving this lol

Just published my first independent working paper on SSRN:

“Asteroid Mining as an Investment Thesis: Financial Viability, DCF Modeling, and Market Implications to 2100.”

The paper tries to approach asteroid mining less from a sci-fi angle and more from a capital markets perspective:

• long-horizon DCF modeling
• launch cost decline assumptions
• commodity market impacts
• whether traditional valuation frameworks even work for projects like this

One conclusion I kept running into was interesting:

Even if asteroid mining becomes technically feasible, traditional finance may still struggle to justify it economically due to discounting, long timelines, and commodity price feedback effects.

I also explored the paradox in which successful large-scale mining could increase PGM supply to the point that future extraction becomes unprofitable.

Still improving the paper and would genuinely appreciate thoughts/criticism from people in finance, commodities, space, or economics.

SSRN Abstract - 6719101