Websnapr start charging for screenshots!
Websnapr have removed much of their free service as of today, now only leaving micro and small views without charge.
It’s a real shame as it was a pretty good setup, a little slow sometimes and it held onto it’s cache for quite a while, but it did what it was supposed to. Also we built our site around their odd screenshot sizes!
I wrote to Websnapr earlier today about their charging but their response indicated that their minimum charge was $45 US dollars a month for a 500,000 shot limit. This was a little steep for us, so we’ve had to find an alternative solution, especially as we cache all the shots on our own server to prevent traffic and we are only planning on getting around a thousand sites a month.
We’ve implemented a system this evening and we’ll see how it hangs together, let us know if you have any problems.
Tags: costs, monthly fee, websnapr
December 14th, 2008 at 7:05 am
Hello,
I was curious what solution you ended up going with and how it’s been working for you. If you could, post an update to this post.
I tried to search your blog but found no other relevant posts.
Best regards,
Brandon
December 27th, 2008 at 1:01 pm
Hi Brandon,
We continued with websnapr in the end and just paid the money!
After several attempts with other services and trying to implement one of our own on our server, we decided the best course of option was to cough up the $40 per month
December 27th, 2008 at 5:08 pm
Ah. I wonder how many others ended up paying them too.
Our service offers you PRO features for that price and allows you to cache locally, like you want. Caching locally with websnapr, as you know, is not allowed.
Did you try out our service (ShrinkTheWeb) as well?
(http://www.shrinktheweb.com)
We have heard from thousands of our members that we are hands down the fastest service and the best combination of features and functionality. You may want to consider giving us a shot too.
In either case, best of success to you in 2009!
Cheers,
Brandon
October 1st, 2009 at 1:16 am
This is rather late and I’m not sure if it’s still applicable, but you might consider checking out http://www.abetaday.com. This sites encourages people to share screenshots instead of urls.
Best,
Greg