[bkrull]

I run BitPixels (http://www.bitpixels.com) that provides automated website thumbnails. I purchased Bitpixels from another HN member a few years ago and have continued to build and market it.

BitPixels currently makes ~$1k/month which is enough to cover the App Engine and DigitalOcean bills plus a bit extra. I'm working to find 1-2 more marketing channels that can drive sustainable growth.

[dizrupt]

Not 100% sure how this works or what it does. Can you explain?

[bkrull]

Definitely, so imagine if HN decided to show a thumbnail image beside every link on the front page so users get a preview of what they'll see before clicking the link. When looking for a solution HN will quickly discover that auto generating website thumbnails is a nontrivial challenge to do well.

BitPixels solves this challenge by providing a simple img tag HTML code that HN would use to automatically generate and cache a png thumbnail of any URL.

Behind the scenes, BitPixels uses a server farm of real Google Chrome browsers to load URLs and take screenshots so the thumbnails look exactly like the real website. Most competitors use open source libraries like phantomjs or cutycapt that produce inaccurate thumbnails on modern websites.