Show HN: A zero effort social image generator for your website | Hacker News Reader

Show HN: A zero effort social image generator for your website

mugshotbot.com

34 pointsjoemasilotti8 comments

I made Mugshot Bot because I spend way too long creating the “perfect” social image for my blog posts. And I figured there’s got to be a better, more automated way.

You type in your website and Mugshot Bot automatically creates an image to share on Twitter, Facebook, or anywhere on the web. All you have to do is copy the generated HTML into your <head>. You don’t even need to download it.

The tool is free to use and randomly creates social images from 80+ backgrounds and 10 colors. It pulls data from your website’s <title> tag and other meta tags to generate the copy.

If you have any questions about the site, or feature requests, let me know! I’m looking forward to seeing your new social image.

Any plans to use the Open Graph tags and also fetch images?

The bot uses the title and description Open Graph rags to render the copy in the image. I’m working on adding a logo that is generated from the favicon and setting the color to match the page!

Would be nice to also show any the associated open graph image as well.

This looks like a great product! Can I ask you want sets you apart from other services in this market like Vercel's og-image [0] or other more marketing-heavy sites that let you have more control and customization?

Also, I'm really curious what this will cost when you release it as a service? What do you think something like this is worth to people? Is it like a $20/year service or like $1,000/year? Are you going after mostly consumers and indie devs or big corporations?

[0] https://github.com/vercel/og-image

Thank you, I appreciate the feedback!

Mugshot Bot is meant to get out of your way. There’s zero configuration, no setup, and very little effort required. Vercel, hosted, requires you visit the site and punch in some information. Or host it yourself.

You can add a Mugshot to your site without evening visiting the landing page. For example, let’s say you blog at masilotti.com. Just set your og:image to `https://www.mugshotbot.com/m?url=https://masilotti.com`. That’s literally it. No downloading, no account, no setup.

My goal is to always keep a free plan with the branding in the bottom. I haven’t figured out exactly the pricing yet, but I’ll be looking at indies and small blogs. So expect something closer to $20 vs. $1000 per year.

I like it. Have you heard of Bannerbear?

Yeah, it looks really cool. The big difference with Mugshot Bot is there is no API or initial set up. You just pass a URL and you are good to go.

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