A Small Business That Turns Web Pages into Images: ScreenshotOne

A Small Business That Turns Web Pages into Images

On May 29, 2022, Dmytro Krasun launched ScreenshotOne. Another program could send it a website URL, and the service would open the page and return an image. Developers could connect the API to their own products to automate web page screenshots. Krasun focused the business on taking over the hassles of managing browsers himself.

He had spent about ten years as a backend developer, building experience with APIs and running services. At work, he handled everything from document management and team collaboration to services that processed large volumes of requests, but he had little time to launch a product of his own. Around the time his child was born, he decided to start a business while raising a family. He had set aside enough living expenses to last about two years.

His first attempt was a Twitter analytics tool. A few people used it, but Krasun did not feel motivated to keep building it. He returned to what he knew best—backend development and APIs—and looked at problems he had encountered over the years. Web page capture stood out. It also suited his experience because it required less work on complex user interfaces.

After buying the domain on January 5, 2022, he built a landing page and started developing the product. He also built a dashboard where users could try the capture feature, check their usage, and move to a paid plan. Alongside development, he published articles related to the product and gradually attracted visitors from search. It took about five months to launch the first version, including a period when he could not work on it.

Capturing web pages came with plenty of problems. Cookie consent dialogs could cover the page, images might not appear until someone scrolled down, and a screenshot could be taken before the page had fully loaded. ScreenshotOne addressed these issues with features such as hiding banners and ads, capturing full pages, and adjusting viewport sizes. Customers needed an image they could use directly in their own products, and Krasun focused on producing that result reliably.

The Search for His First Customer

At launch, people were visiting from search, but no one was paying yet. During June 2022, Krasun tried search ads, Reddit, Indie Hackers, product directories, and other channels. He spent $515 on Google Ads and got 2,144 clicks, but no paid customers from the ads that month. Reviewing the search terms also showed him that he needed to distinguish people looking for ordinary computer screenshots from those who needed his API.

The first payment arrived on July 4. Jannis, whom Krasun had met on Twitter, was building a directory of tools for creators and needed to automatically generate images of each tool's website. ScreenshotOne fit the job. The second customer came through a paid Google ad, after which Krasun put more effort into growing search traffic.

On Twitter, he regularly shared what he was building, along with revenue, costs, and setbacks. He answered other founders' questions, helped with product launches, and connected people he knew. Those relationships brought early customers and referrals, and helped him keep going through difficult periods. Later, Krasun said that developer and founder communities had played an important role in winning his first paying customers.

His search content grew out of problems he had encountered while developing the product. For example, he explained how to hide ads and cookie banners when capturing a web page, and showed how to do the same with ScreenshotOne. Readers could follow the guide and build the feature themselves, or choose a service that already handled it. The knowledge he gained while building the product became a way to reach potential customers.

After publishing an article, he used actual search data to improve it. He wrote a long guide to capturing web pages with Puppeteer, then checked Google Search Console three or four weeks later to see which search terms brought visitors. He downloaded the query, impression, and click data to revise existing articles or choose topics for new ones. He kept publishing and updating content around specific problems he knew how to solve.

The Product Hunt launch also helped him find customers. ScreenshotOne made the top products of the day, giving it more exposure. Krasun said the launch also had a positive effect on the product's credibility and search traffic. From then on, he treated search as a major customer acquisition channel and continued improving the product.

Understanding Why Customers Pay

Krasun said one of the most important changes in growing the business was getting clearer about whom he was selling to. He recalled that it took about two years to understand who his customers were. He then began tailoring the product, content, design, and pricing to them. He also examined the steps from visitor to signup and from signup to payment, fixing what was missing at each stage.

The writing platform Typeshare showed the value of ScreenshotOne. Typeshare used it to generate and export images of users' writing for social media and other channels. Co-founder Sam Shore said the company had spent thousands of dollars trying to build its own image generation feature, without getting satisfactory results. By paying ScreenshotOne's monthly fee, he said, he got the value of having a developer take care of image generation for him.

At WordPress hosting company Kinsta, screenshots were used to verify updates. The team captured a page before and after updating a plugin or theme, then compared the two images to look for unexpected visual changes. ScreenshotOne supplied the images needed for this process. Kinsta could use them to check the update and decide whether it needed to restore the previous version.

Kinsta also valued how quickly Krasun responded. When the company needed a change to request limits or an improvement to an integration, he moved quickly. Kinsta said that when it requested a feature available in the API but missing from the Node.js integration, Krasun fixed and deployed it within minutes. Resolving small issues discovered during real customer use helped build trust in the service.

Turning Recurring Work into Recurring Revenue

The pricing combined a monthly subscription with usage-based charges. Customers could make as many captures as their plan included, then pay for additional requests when needed. Higher-tier plans came with more captures, higher request limits, and extra features. As a customer's workload grew, ScreenshotOne's revenue could grow with it.

Growing usage also meant managing server costs. Krasun started with a $5-per-month server, but moved the service several times as the customer base grew. He used Google Cloud to take advantage of free credits and scalability, then moved to DigitalOcean when costs became too high. At one point, he also raised prices to cover the server bills.

He also needed to cover his family's living expenses until revenue was large enough. As his initial savings dwindled, Krasun felt the pressure and took on outside development work to pay the bills. In hindsight, he said he wished he had started that work earlier and shifted gradually as revenue from his own product increased.

In September 2024, ScreenshotOne reached $10,000 in monthly recurring revenue (MRR), the first milestone Krasun had wanted to hit with his business. By June 2025, MRR had grown to $20,000. In a retrospective the following July, he said it had surpassed his former salary and given his family more room for travel and everyday life.

On May 29, 2026, the company's fourth anniversary, it had reached $33,000 in MRR and more than 1,000 paying customers. The API had processed over 100 million requests in total. In a retrospective dated August 31 of the same year, Krasun said MRR had grown to around $35,000. What began as a service the first customer paid for to generate images for a website directory had become a business handling recurring work for multiple companies.

The service's use cases had also expanded to AI products. In a Toolhouse case study published in July 2026, users could connect their own ScreenshotOne API key and have AI agents capture and analyze web pages. Toolhouse's co-founder said ScreenshotOne came to mind when the feature was needed because he had followed Krasun's work for a long time. The development notes and relationships Krasun had shared early on helped connect the product to a new use case.

In his fourth-anniversary retrospective, Krasun pointed to being able to spend time with his family and attend important events in his child's life as outcomes of building the business. The product that supported that life focused on one job: reliably turning web pages into images. Typeshare's image generation, Kinsta's update checks, and Toolhouse's web page analysis were different business needs, but they all depended on the same capture feature. ScreenshotOne handled that shared task, solved problems that came up in real use, and gave customers a reason to keep paying.