What happens when you challenge yourself to ship one developer tool every day for a week? You learn a lot about rapid prototyping, what developers actually need, and how to deploy things that don't break at 2 AM.
This is the story of how we went from one product (GrabShot, a screenshot API) to a portfolio of 7+ free tools, all running on a single VPS with Node.js, Express, and Caddy.
Before starting, we set constraints:
Give it any URL, get back every color used on the page. CSS colors, computed styles, image dominant colors. Useful for designers analyzing competitor sites or building style guides.
Puppeteer color-thief CSS parsing
What we learned: Extracting colors from computed styles is trickier than it sounds. CSS variables, gradients, and rgba values all need different handling.
Dead-simple cron job monitoring. Your cron hits a unique URL when it runs. If it misses a beat, you get alerted. Also does basic uptime monitoring.
SQLite Webhooks Email alerts
What we learned: The hardest part was timezone handling. Cron expressions plus user timezones plus "expected next run" calculations are a rabbit hole.
Preview and test HTML email templates across different email clients. Validates your HTML, checks for common rendering issues, and sends test emails.
MJML Resend API HTML validation
What we learned: Email HTML is still stuck in 1999. Tables for layout, inline styles only, and every client renders differently. Building the validator was eye-opening.
Identify every font used on any website. Shows font families, weights, sizes, and where each font is loaded from. Useful for designers and developers.
Puppeteer Font enumeration WOFF parsing
What we learned: System fonts vs. web fonts vs. fallback fonts create layers of complexity. Chrome DevTools Protocol has a Fonts domain that helps a lot.
Crawl any website and find every broken link, redirect chain, and missing resource. Generates a report with fix suggestions.
Crawler HTTP validation Rate limiting
What we learned: Rate limiting your crawler is critical. We accidentally hammered a site on day one and got our IP temporarily blocked. Now we do 2 requests/second max with exponential backoff.
Take screenshots of two URLs (or the same URL at different times) and highlight visual differences pixel by pixel. Great for catching CSS regressions.
Puppeteer pixelmatch Sharp
What we learned: Anti-aliasing and subpixel rendering make naive pixel comparison useless. You need a threshold and structural comparison, not exact matching.
Run a quick performance, accessibility, and SEO audit on any URL. Think Lighthouse, but as an API you can integrate into your CI/CD pipeline.
Lighthouse Puppeteer Performance metrics
What we learned: Lighthouse scores vary between runs. We average 3 runs and report the median to get stable, reproducible results.
Every tool runs on the same infrastructure:
Total infrastructure cost: about $15/month. Wildcard DNS on Cloudflare means adding a new subdomain is just a Caddy config change.
All tools are live and free to use. The flagship product is GrabShot (screenshot API), but the whole portfolio is available:
25 free screenshots per month. No credit card required. One API call to capture any website.
Try the Free APIWe're focused on making the existing tools better rather than building new ones. Better docs, more integrations, and listening to what developers actually need. If you have a feature request or found a bug, reach out.