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Comment by CMCDragonkai | Hacker News Reader

I calculated the average price per usage versus Prerender.io for average sites. And it comes out to be cheaper or equivalent to the standard price of Prerender.io.

Basically take the amount of usages you use of Prerender.io per month, and compare it yourself.

What do you mean by more code to insert? I do know of Prerender.io but more code depends on which framework/language you're using. If it's node. It's pretty much one line.

The extra code is just options that allow you to customise the way the interceptor works, these options include things like blacklist, whitelist, regex, extensions ignoring, client side caching.. etc. But the basic usage is the just key + email, and you're good to go.

Also note that unlike Prerender, our cache storage is free, so we don't track how many pages you have.

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I see three lines of code whereas prerender.io is one line. I guess that's because they don't need you to configure the client with the API key or email.

That's not really a huge difference, although it is still a little bit more effort.

It really comes down to price I think.

I can't really tell for sure what calculation to use to compare the pricing. Looks like you might be cheaper.

You might consider doing a blog or something comparing the pricing though because I think other people know about prerender also and having a simple explanation that proves your pricing is better would make it easier for people to make that decision.

Ah, well Prerender does use a single file, which means they haven't broken down their middleware into 3 components. All SnapSearch middleware is broken down (OOP style) into Detector, Client and Interceptor.

I recognised, that this OOP strictness leads to a bit more verbosity.

Therefore, for PHP I build a Stack interceptor. For Ruby, there's a Rack alternative. NodeJS has the expressConnector. Python doesn't have a single thing that brings them together atm.

These integration points, make the entire thing a one liner to integrate.

If you're referring to node, here's the connectInterceptor. Usage is on the README: https://github.com/SnapSearch/SnapSearch-Client-Node/blob/ma...

Also sure, I'm going to get a blog up soon. Thanks for the advice. I'll do one on comparing pricing.

But do note, that the fact that we use Firefox instead of QTWebkit means that we get 6 week release cycles so our scrapers keep up with the latest development HTML5 unlike the slower QTWebkit of PhantomJS. So we do have a technical advantage :)

Same question than the one asked some months ago [1]:

> Why should someone use your service instead of existing ones? What is your added-value compared for example to seo4ajax.com?

It loooks like the innovation is just to use Firefox instead of PhantomJS. Maybe I am wrong.

[1] https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=6781843

Hey gildas, I answered a similar question here https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=7765731

Is there any difference in functionality or added benefit of using your service over prerender?

Here's a shortlist of differences and benefits:

1. SnapSearch uses load balanced Firefox, this allows us to keep up with the latest in HTML5 unlike the QtWebkit of PhantomJS

2. SnapSearch does metered billing, this comes out cheaper for average sites, or sites that have lots of pages but dont send out tons of requests. We charge on usages, not cached requests, and not on cach storage.

3. SnapSearch's middleware is more robust, with 200 robots that it checks, and regularly updated robot list. There's a lot of flexibility in the code.

4. We provide you a bit more analytics in the control panel, so you can see things like request portion from multiple domains, requests/usages from search engines over a month. A progress bar on usages bar. A cache storage list of all the snapshots you have so you can precache pages if you wish.

Try it out, it's free for 1000 usages per month!

Also note that our API supports custom javascript callbacks, which allows you to do all sorts of interesting things prior to the caching of the snapshot.

Furthermore, we also support soft 404s and redirections (including meta tag, header and js redirections (synchronoous and asynchronous). All of it is explained on the documentation.

Flash support coming soon too.

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