The price anchor
| Snapfleet | Urlbox | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $0 — no subscription | $19/mo |
| Annual | $0 after purchase | $228 |
| 5-year total | $99 | $1,140 |
| 10-year total | $99 | $2,280 |
Subscription figures from the vendor's published pricing ($19/mo, ~$228/yr); the Snapfleet column is the full price, paid once.
Break-even analysis
Just over 5 months of Urlbox pays for Snapfleet outright — $228/yr saved, unlimited renders forever.
- After 1 year: Snapfleet has cost you $99 total — Urlbox has cost $228.
- After 3 years: Snapfleet is still $99 — the subscription is at $684.
- After 5 years: Snapfleet is still $99 — the subscription is at $1,140.
What you get for $99 once
- One endpoint, every option. GET /api/v1/screenshot?url=... returns PNG, JPG or PDF — viewport, full-page, delay, wait conditions, dark-mode emulation, JPEG quality and retina scale.
- Element clipping. Pass a CSS selector and get just that element — perfect for og-images and social cards.
- API keys built in. Named keys with per-key token-bucket rate limits and daily quotas, usage counters, revoke/regenerate.
- Smart cache. Identical requests hit a SHA-256-keyed disk cache with HIT/MISS headers, default 24h TTL and per-request bypass.
- Browser pool. One shared Chromium with configurable concurrency, request queue, 30s job timeouts and automatic relaunch if the browser crashes.
- No renewal, ever. The license does not expire and there is no per-seat meter — $99 is the whole price.
Pricing questions
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — MIT source at github.com/bensblueprints/snapfleet-mvp, always. $99 buys the 1-click installer and updates. From source it's npm i && npm start (heads-up: Puppeteer downloads ~170MB of Chromium on first install).
Is it as reliable as Urlbox?
Urlbox runs a global render fleet with retries and edge caching — for millions of renders a month at five nines, they earn their fee. Snapfleet is one pooled Chromium on your box with queueing, timeouts and crash recovery — for og-images, link previews, PDFs and internal tooling, that's honestly all you need.
What do people use it for?
Open-graph image generation, link previews, PDF invoices and receipts of web pages, visual monitoring, archiving, and thumbnails for directories — anywhere you'd otherwise pay per render.
Can it screenshot pages behind my firewall?
Yes — that's a headline feature. Because it runs on your infrastructure it can reach localhost and RFC1918 addresses (ALLOW_PRIVATE defaults to on). No cloud screenshot API can do that.
Snapfleet — $99, one time
Or get Snapfleet plus every other app in the suite: the OneTimeSuite bundle is currently $97, one time.