Every developer who needs to automate screenshots eventually asks: should I run Puppeteer/Playwright myself, or use a screenshot API? I've done this comparison across multiple projects. Here's the honest breakdown. The DIY Headless Chrome Approach Running your own Puppeteer instance looks simple: const puppeteer = require ( ' puppeteer ' ); async function screenshot ( url ) { const browser = await puppeteer . launch (); const page = await browser . newPage (); await page . goto ( url , { waitUntil : ' networkidle2 ' }); const buffer = await page . screenshot ({ fullPage : true }); await browser . close (); return buffer ; } Enter fullscreen mode Exit fullscreen mode Looks fine. Now wait for production to hit it. Hidden Operational Costs Memory : Each Chrome instance uses 200-400MB RAM. At 10 concurrent screenshots, that's 2-4GB just for Chrome. Kubernetes auto-scaling events, higher instance tier needed. CPU : Chrome rendering is CPU-intensive.…