ApiFlash is a simple, inexpensive screenshot API built on Chrome and AWS Lambda. At
volume it is much cheaper than we are, and this page will not pretend otherwise. Here is
what the difference buys.
The short version. ApiFlash is cheaper — less than half our price at 10,000 a month. Screenshotline
has a bigger free tier, more control over what gets removed from the page, PDF and
Markdown output, and an open-source renderer.
Price, side by side
Screenshotline
ApiFlash
Free
500 renders/month, no card
100 screenshots/month, no card
Entry
$17/month for 2,000
Lite $7/month for 1,000
10,000 a month
$79/month ($7.90/1k)
Medium $35/month ($3.50/1k)
High volume
$259/month for 50,000 ($5.18/1k)
Large $180/month for 100,000 ($1.80/1k)
Where ApiFlash is better
Price. $3.50 per 1,000 at 10,000 a month against our $7.90, and $1.80 per 1,000 at 100,000. If cost per render is what decides it, ApiFlash wins.
A cheaper way in. $7 a month for 1,000 screenshots.
Export to S3 on every paid plan. We do not upload anywhere.
Serverless scaling. Built on AWS Lambda; we run a warm browser pool in one region.
Proxies and IP geolocation on their Enterprise plan. We offer neither.
Where Screenshotline is better
A bigger free tier. 500 renders a month against 100.
More control over the page. Besides ads and cookie banners: chat widgets, newsletter and donation popups, hiding any selector, injecting CSS or JavaScript, setting cookies, and capturing a single element.
PDF and Markdown output.format=pdf, and /extract for the rendered page as Markdown.
It tells you when a 200 is wrong. A probably-blank capture is flagged in an X-Blank-Suspected header, and within a monthly allowance it is not billed.
Open source. The renderer is AGPL-3.0; self-host it if the hosted price is the problem.
Measured, not claimed
On 9 September 2026 we sent the same 18 news front pages through both APIs at the
same viewport. Both captured all 18. We are not quoting a latency comparison: our
benchmark did not force fresh renders, so ApiFlash's free tier served some pages from its
cache, and a cached image is not a render time.
What Screenshotline does not do
Video, GIFs or scrolling-video captures. Full-page screenshots, yes; moving pictures, no. Out of scope, deliberately.
Proxies, IP geolocation or stealth mode. We do not try to get past
bot walls. When a page shows a captcha, you get the captcha — and we would rather say
so than sell a way around it.
Async jobs, webhooks, or upload to your storage. A request returns the
image. That is the whole interface.
SDKs. There are copy-paste HTTP snippets for curl, Node.js, Python, PHP
and Go instead — the API is one GET request.
A track record. The hosted API launched in September 2026 and runs in one
region (US East). There is no uptime history to show you yet, and no SLA.
Which to choose
Choose ApiFlash if
Cost per render is the deciding factor, at any real volume
You want captures exported to S3
Plain screenshots of cooperative pages are all you need
Choose Screenshotline if
You want 500 free renders a month
You need chat widgets, popups or specific elements removed
You need PDF or Markdown from the same API
You want to self-host rather than pay per render at all
ApiFlash's prices and features were checked on 11 September 2026 on their own site:
ApiFlash pricing.
Prices change. If anything here is out of date or unfair, open an issue
and it will be corrected.