Nice. I quit my job to build a product[0] to solve this exact problem.

I’m not interested in news but I love reading blog posts, newsletters and interesting technical discussions on HN or reddit.

So I built KTool as a “read it later on Kindle” solution. It supports web links, newsletters (via email forwarding) and RSS. I also added the ability to compile multiple articles into one magazine/ebook and deliver them at a specific time.

Give it a try if you’re a Kindle owner.

[0]: https://ktool.io

FYI there are some styling issues on your landing page on Firefox mobile (dont see it on chrome)

Thank you. Working on the fix rn

I discovered KTool here when you launched and I love it! I hope you’re doing well

Thank you for your early support

I have a kobo and I use Instapaper. Is this similar?

It depends. Many people run OpenClaw agent with a cron job, so it won’t consume too many tokens too quickly. In this case it’s exactly 5 hours.

It isn't exactly 5 hours, it's got a +/-10 minute window.

The essay is quite similar to this one from strangestloop.io[0]

[0]: https://strangestloop.io/essays/things-that-arent-doing-the-...

Honestly, it feels like straight up plagiarism. When I saw the title, I thought I knew which website was posted because I had seen it before. When I clicked, I saw an unfamiliar website and was surprised that it was posted 3 days ago rather than a couple months ago.

The contents are so similar, that it cannot be coincidence. It really seems like the author of this blog simply plagiarized the strangestloop post without referring to it at all...

Same thoughts here. I gave it the benefit of the doubt, thought it might be an adoption for a specific field, or an extension of thought, or maybe a fun twist or something.

This is a tasteless copy.

I’m glad someone mentioned this. Couldn’t remember where I’d read this but knew there was something really similar.

This has been a major UX problem for me when building my app [0] (an AI chat client for power user).

On the one hand, I want the UI to be simple and minimal enough so even non savvy users can use it.

But on the other hand, I do need to support more advanced features, with more configuration panels.

I learned that the solution in this case is “progressive disclosure”. By default, the app only show just enough UI elements to get the 90% cases done. For the advanced use cases, it takes more effort. Usually to enable them in Settings, or an Inspector pane etc. Power users can easily tinker around and tweak them. While non savvy users can stick with the default, usual UX flow.

Though even with this technique, choosing what to show by default is still not easy. I learned that I need to be clear about my Ideal Customer Profile (ICP) and optimize for that profile only.

[0]: https://boltai.com

Shameless plug: I build Chat Vault to help you import all chat data from ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Le Chat (Mistral) to a native mac app.

You can search, browse and continue your chats 100% offline.

It’s free while in beta https://testflight.apple.com/join/RJx6sP6t

Is this something I could do with openwebui?

Open WebUI does support import/export from a JSON file, but may need a translation for ChatGPT data.

Nice

Shameless plug: I build Chat Vault to help you import all chat data from ChatGPT, Claude, Grok and Le Chat (Mistral) to a native mac app.

You can search, browse and continue your chats 100% offline.

It’s free while in beta https://testflight.apple.com/join/RJx6sP6t

Ah you’re right. Thank you.

Never mind. Suddenly I can see downvote button now so maybe just HN server hiccup?

From time to time (like once or twice per month) HN goes to read only mode for a few minutes (while dang is making some weird update?), and the downvote buttons disappear. Can this be the explanation???

My friend Dmytro[0] has been running a screenshot API called ScreenshotOne[1]. He's been building it solo and has reached $20K MRR recently.

[0]: https://x.com/DmytroKrasun

[1]: https://screenshotone.com

Does he manage his own automated browsers? I suppose this could simply be a wrapper for something like Scrapfly (or Scraping Bee or Zen Rows or many others), with some custom JS injected to remove banners.

I managed my own cluster.

I didn’t consider wrapping any service.

What needed for scraping is a bit different for what needed to screenshot websites.

I need to have full control over my cluster to guarantee the best possible quality.

It is great!

I signed up on my phone and tested in the playground.

It will fit perfectly into my workflow. I'm building a hyper-local directory site.

Getting good images for businesses is hard, so I'll use this to grab an image of their site as a place holder.

I can also add it to my AI workflow where I pass a website to OpenAI Assistant to extract data. OpenAI s not as robust with URLs as it is with images or PDFs. Often it won't visit then URL.

I can use this to get an image or pdf, pass it on and ask for the data back. OpenAI is better with files than URLs in my experience.

Good job!

Well done!

Don't you get problems with cloudflare blocking your browsers?

This is awesome. wondering how would a company like this build a user base? Any ideas / speculation would be appreciated!

It was unimaginably tough. If I were to start again, I wouldn’t do it. I would choose a much easier niche.

SEO, social media and other channels. I spent a lot of time on all of that.

What would be an easier niche in your opinion?

Thanks for BoltAI as well, by the way.

Thank you

Wondering what his monthly profit is if that’s not too personal, MRR doesn’t really tell me anything when I don’t know operating costs IMO.

He builds it in public so maybe you can find more details on his X profile. Last time he shared the server cost was about $5k/mo https://x.com/dmytrokrasun/status/1917817087461933560?s=46

I spent a lot on servers. Around $5500 all monthly expenses.

Dug around their twitter a bit and they mentioned at one point having $14K MRR and $4K expenses

Such a great product. Happy customer since years!

Thank you!

Thanks for the mention, my friend!

holy crap - our company needs basically exactly this for a crazy feature our PM cooked up and we were gonna build something similar ourselves - this will save us so much time

Browserless can do this for free:

docker run -p 3000:3000 browserless/chrome:latest

Sounds like this does a lot more than simply take a screenshot. It mentions removing cookie banners, ads, etc. which is an always moving target.

If you have one, very narrow specific use case, then maybe that’s not so bad. But sounds like a huge pain if you need that for any arbitrary site.

> Sounds like this does a lot more than simply take a screenshot. It mentions removing cookie banners, ads, etc. which is an always moving target.

Oh okay so it does:

chrome --load-extension=path/to/ublock --headless --screenshot https://website.com

Couldn't this be done with a headless Firefox and adblocker extensions?

I’m sure it could be. Just like I could bake an apple pie by first sowing wheat and planting apple trees.

Feels like Dropbox comment.

Browserless is not free for commercial use.

> instead of managing browser clusters, and handling all the corner cases

The cost with running a docker container is you have to manage that container. You’re paying with dev time not money.

Exactly this. We keep forgetting time and money that needs to be paid to a developer to setup and manage stuff.

I cant edit the above post but follow that command with a request for a screenshot like so:

    curl -X POST http://localhost:3000/screenshot \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "https://example.com"}' \
  --output screenshot.png

And what commands do I run if I want to do 100 screenshots per second?

Not arguing as a part of this thread but as an aside.

Can chrome even take 100 screenshots a second? What would be the max? I think it's interesting.

Yeah that's basically just a 100 FPS video at that point lol

Well, for some users and uses, it's free. It seems they consider their small amount glue between docker and chrome a to be of commercial value. Still better than the original.

https://github.com/browserless/browserless/blob/main/LICENSE

Following the journey from the beginning

I also have a similar api Screenshot api and web scraping api

https://capturekit.dev

> Turn Websites Into Screenshots with a simple API

If anyone wants to build “turn websites into APIs” and do it really well like OP, feel free to hmu.

Highly experienced full-stack and rust developer with experience at startups, G and Google X.

It's a good idea. Lately I've been building many android apps in kotlin that all just use web scraping instead of REST APIs.

So if you want, "turn your website into an app", that would be interesting.

MRR?

Monthly Recurring Revenue