Aleksei Serebriakov 🐍

Quick question for devs: When you use a screenshot or PDF API, what's the one thing that always breaks your flow? Building one, genuinely curious what hurts most.

HTML-to-PDF tip nobody tells you: Set `printBackground: true` in your Chrome options. Half of "my PDF looks completely wrong" issues are just white backgrounds where colors should be. Transparent by default. Silently breaks everything. Also: A4 vs Letter page size will wreck your layout without a single error message.

Saturday morning in Tbilisi. Coffee. Terminal. SnapAPI. 30 followers, 1 paying customer, 0 regrets. This is the life. #buildinpublic

@mailerwills Yeah exactly. The assumption that agents need affordances is just projection. They need reliable endpoints, predictable outputs, clear error codes. That's it. Discovery is a human problem we're solving on their behalf.

@slwl_dev Yeah, somehow brutal 😞, no place for forgiveness 🙈 Hardest UX assumption to unlearn for agents: Thinking they need anything human friendly or discoverable.

I got the second publication from Agentmail, I can't love Agent less "If you want to get rich in the next 5 years, stop building for humans. Start building for AI agents." They called it the "Headless SaaS". take tools we already use (email, payments, storage, calendars, search)

@Niru0077 @ankurdotio @sheryians_ No deadline is underrated honestly. You ship when it's right, not when it's rushed. Clean UI focus will pay off — users notice it even when they don't say it. Keep building 💪

@slwl_dev @ankurdotio @sheryians_ Now I will makes project without a deadline and also I am making this dashboard more friendly with a clean ui . So now I will focus more about learning new things and implementing in my projects.

Day 21/21 of #buildinpublic Final day. Added an Al dashboard where users can chat with Al. Not fully complete yet - will keep improving features and UI/UX. 21 days of building, learning, and consistency. This is just the start. @ankurdotio @sheryians_ #webdev #ai

@petitpois28 That's a good signal to filter on. For me it'd be devs already making content about Playwright or Puppeteer — they're literally in the problem space. Small audiences but very targeted, probably better conversion than going broad.

@slwl_dev more content relevance, you enter a game that is similar to yours and see if there are content creators playing or reviewing the game.

Building a tool to help indie devs kickstart their creator outreach. It scans for relevant channels, analyzes stats, and exports everything you need to start pitching. Looking for feedback—is this something you'd use? ​#gamedev #indiedev #marketing youtube.com/shorts/u9v8PcF…

fellow screenshot API builder here 👋 I went the hosted headless Chrome route with snapapi.pics — REST API, send HTML/URL, get screenshot or PDF back. curious what angle you're taking with the Chrome plugin approach vs a standalone API. are you targeting browser-based screenshot (extension) or server-side (API)?

@christiangori96 There is no URL at this point. I am building Chrome plugins and APIs. Screenshot and QR code. Plugins are done not launched in Chrome store. API is being developed, want to keep first launch minimal in scope.

Drop your project URL Let’s drive some traffic Curious to know what you all are building 👇🏼

lean stack is the right call for solo — no-code for core UX flows, add custom code only where it matters. Figma+Bubble is underrated combo for speed. one thing UX tools often need later: automated screenshot capture for before/after comparisons or client reporting. built snapapi.pics for that exact use case if you ever get there 🔥

I'm building UXRize using a lean stack to keep it fast & affordable: • Design: Figma Build: Bubble / No-Code Brain: Gemini Al If you want to see how a solo designer builds a SaaS from scratch with $O, hit that follow button! #BuildInPublic #IndieHackers #UXDesign

Design in Figma. Explain in UXRize. Stop letting your portfolio stay "Under Construction" for months. I'm building a platform that turns your project notes into professional, recruiter-ready case studies in minutes. Dropping the waitlist soon. Stay tuned. #BuildInPublic #UXDesign

nice benchmark — 2.48ms template generation is fast. different angle from what I'm building (snapapi.pics handles browser-render based PDF/screenshots from HTML/URL, headless Chrome managed). template-based vs browser-render are both valid approaches depending on the use case. fellow PDF API builder 👊 what's the target ICP for GoPdfSuit?

GoPdfSuit REST API: POST /api/v1/generate/template-pdf → PDF in 2.48ms POST /api/v1/merge → combine PDFs POST /api/v1/htmltopdf → HTML to PDF POST /api/v1/fill → fill forms POST /api/v1/redact/apply → secure redaction Language agnostic. Docker ready. github.com/chinmay-sawant…

what are you working on this week? share your website to get some traffic ↓ (I would choose 3 projects to feature in my newsletter, FromScratch + 2K subscribers)

@imrandev @JorgeMenaDev the oom killer visiting at 3am is a rite of passage. eventually switched to a managed headless Chrome API (snapapi.pics) — offloads the whole infra nightmare. no chrome in docker, no memory tuning, just send HTML get PDF/screenshot back. saved my sanity

@JorgeMenaDev docker + puppeteer is a whole different level of pain. the memory just keeps climbing until everything crashes

What's the worst developer tooling pain you've just... accepted? For me it was Puppeteer for PDF generation. 800ms per document. Memory leaks. Chrome in Docker. I accepted it for years before finally building something better. What's yours? #buildinpublic

Puppeteer + NestJS gets heavy fast — memory spikes, cold starts, Chrome crashes under load. been there. managed headless Chrome API is the move for prod: no infra, pay-per-request, scales automatically. built snapapi.pics for this exact problem if you want to test it. free tier, no card needed.

What’s the best way to handle PDF generation in production? Currently using Puppeteer with Node and NestJS but it’s heavy in Docker. Thinking: - microservice? - lighter lib? Would love suggestions 👇

@obeydulX Hi! Sub and like for sub back

Looking for a boost? 🚀 Comment 'Hi' for a follow back and let's hit 500! 💯🌟

@jasper_yy day 12, 9 users — momentum is building! 🚀 rooting for you. I'm on a similar journey with snapapi.pics — screenshot + PDF API, also at early stage. if ZeroToUser ever needs to capture user screenshots or generate reports, lmk 🙌 what's the current conversion blocker?

Day 12 building ZeroToUser. Users: 9 MRR: $0 Current mission: first paying customer. Every SaaS starts from zero. zerotouser.com/progress #buildinpublic #indiehackers #Startups

@Utkarsh74256151 Fellow screenshot API builder 👋 We shipped snapapi.pics doing exactly this — URL in, screenshot out in under 2s. Love seeing more solutions in the space. What's your rendering stack — Puppeteer, Playwright, or CDP direct? Always curious about impl approaches!

I'm building a Website Screenshot API from scratch Send a URL → get a screenshot back in 2 seconds. No setup. No headaches. Just one API call. Follow along if you want to see how a solo dev builds and launches a SaaS from zero #buildinpublic #indiehacker #SaaS

Playwright is powerful but gets heavy fast 😅 We built snapapi.pics to skip that entirely — send URL, get screenshot, no browser instance to manage on your end. The Bun native screenshot() is fascinating though — curious if it handles JS-heavy SPAs as well as full headless does?

@jarredsumner The screenshot() API alone saves so much boilerplate. Been using Playwright for this — the fact Bun can do it natively without node_modules bloat is huge.

In the next version of Bun `Bun.WebView` programmatically controls a headless web browser in Bun

Nice combo — AI offer generation + improved PDF export is exactly the kind of feature pairing that builds stickiness 💡 If the PDF rendering ever becomes a bottleneck, snapapi.pics handles HTML → PDF via API (clean output, custom fonts, no infra). Might be worth a look for that export layer!

@ProductHunt A new AI feature for offer generation in my SaaS, plus improvements to PDF export and email sending. What about you?

what did you ship this week? drop it in the replies 🫶

100% — credibility-first is such an underrated GTM strategy 📊 For any devs shipping that boardroom-ready PDF: snapapi.pics handles the HTML → PDF rendering via API. Clean output, custom fonts, no browser infra to manage. Worth checking out for that day-one export polish!

The fastest way to de-risk a SaaS? Ship the export first. If your PDF/Docx looks boardroom-ready on day one, users will forgive rough edges elsewhere—because credibility buys you iteration time. Beauty is a feature. #SaaS #UX

Day 10 with PDF export already — love the momentum! 🔥 If you ever want to offload the rendering layer, snapapi.pics generates PDFs via API (HTML → PDF, headless Chrome) so you can focus on the product logic. Could simplify things as you scale — happy to set you up with free credits!

Day 10 of building SaaS in public 🚀 ✅ Added chat export to PDF feature! ✅ Makes saving convos super easy Check it out! Useful or not? #buildinpublic #saas #AI

Fellow headless screenshot builder here! 👋 We went the hosted API route with snapapi.pics — skip the BullMQ queue management and just hit an endpoint. Curious: are you building this as your own SaaS or internal tooling? Would love to compare notes on the rendering stack!

@aarav_dev05 I am building API gateway to do async processing using BullMQ, redis and express.js. The problem I solve are two, QR code and screenshots that are headless.

What are you building? Drop a link and pitch your startup. Want to see some cool projects.

Exactly this — Puppeteer's RAM appetite makes self-hosting painful for large PDFs. That's precisely why we built snapapi.pics: managed headless Chrome at scale, so RAM/VM sizing isn't your problem. Large PDFs, custom viewports, waitFor CSS selectors — all via one API call. Worth bookmarking for next time!

@idenyigabriel @hcdotdev Sometimes it's useful to have been through that, like when you have to create very large PDF files, and wkhtmltopdf is the only viable alternative. (Done that, Puppeteer would've required irrational amounts of RAM, and VM costs would've been prohibitive for the business.)

The idea that backend is just CRUD has to be one of dumbest take about web development, it sits right next to another dumb idea that tailwind is a replacement for css.