Webshotter vs DIY Puppeteer
Everybody starts here, and for a low volume it is genuinely the right answer. What changes the maths is not the screenshot — it is everything around it.
Where we win
Cold starts, gone
Browsers stay up with a pool of warm pages. A warm render is around 460ms; a Lambda cold start is measured in seconds.
The font rabbit hole
Emoji, CJK, and the web fonts a page loads for itself. This is where most DIY screenshot services quietly render the wrong thing forever.
Isolation you did not have to think about
Every render gets its own browser context, destroyed afterwards, so no cookie or storage from one page reaches the next.
SSRF refusals
Private, loopback and metadata addresses are refused — including public hostnames that resolve to them, and redirects into them. A screenshot service that skips this is an internal-network proxy for anyone who can call it.
Where DIY Puppeteer wins
Cost at very low volume
A hundred screenshots a month on a box you already pay for is free.
Total control
It is your code. Nothing is behind an API you do not own.
We publish this side on purpose. A comparison that can't name a reason to pick the other one is an advert.
Try the difference in one call.
Point both services at the same page with the same device, and compare the emoji in the pictures that come back.
curl https://webshotter.com/api/v1/webshots \ -H "Authorization: Bearer $WEBSHOTTER_TOKEN" \ -d '{"url": "https://moxial.ovh", "preset": "iphone", "emoji_set": "apple"}' -o moxial.jpg