Why I don't build my own screenshot service

Batch52 is a platform I built for home bakers and cottage food businesses. Each baker gets their own website, and I show a small preview of it on the Batch52 home page and in the baker's dashboard. Anytime a baker updates their site or adds a product to their home page, a new screenshot gets taken.

I don't generate those screenshots. Allscreenshots does. I send it a URL of a baker's website and it sends back an image.

I could build this myself, and the first version would be easy. The problem is everything after that. I'd own a headless browser running on a server, plus the slow pages, timeouts, retries, and updates that come with it. That's a lot of extra infrastructure to maintain for something that is not a core feature I'm bringing to my ideal customer.

No baker is going to pick Batch52 because the thumbnails are homemade. So this is plumbing, and when someone sells plumbing at a reasonable price, I buy it and spend my time on the things bakers do care about.

Allscreenshots wrote up how Batch52 uses their API here: https://allscreenshots.com/customer-stories/batch52. I've really enjoyed working with them and I'm excited for the day where batch52 is big enough to upgrade our plan to use Allscreenshots even more.