Link Preview API

Link previews always sit on that critical path between input and UI, so even small delays get noticeable fast.How do you think about latency vs. completeness here?Congrats on the launch!

The dedicated handling for Amazon, YouTube and friends is the part that actually earns the free tier, since generic OG scraping falls apart on exactly those. One thing I hit building preview cards: the og:image for a lot of big sites is a signed CDN link that expires, so a card you cached looks fine today and 403s the image tomorrow. Do you rehost or proxy the image so the preview stays stable, or hand back the origin URL as-is? That changes a lot for anyone caching results.

This solves a surprisingly annoying problem. Congrats on the launch!How reliable is it when sites change their metadata or introduce new anti-bot measures?

Really like the concept. Pulling this data is, in theory, simple enough. Until you hit an edge case and get blocked... or get junk content returned for no apparent reason. Can certainly think of places where this will be useful. Congrats on a strong product.

Having just spent time on the other side of this (getting OG tags, sitemaps and canonicals right for my own SaaS), I appreciate how much invisible work goes into making previews "just work." The per-site handlers for YouTube/Amazon/etc. sound like the honest solution. Question: how do you handle cache freshness? If a site updates its og:image, how quickly does the API reflect that — and can callers force a refresh?

genuinely useful and the 20k free requests is generous, but I'm curious about the business model rather than the technical side. proxy rotation and JS rendering at scale isn't cheap, so is this free tier subsidized by Exabase's paid platform, or is link preview itself expected to be a loss-leader that gets people into the rest of the product? just wondering what happens to reliability if this specific tool gets way more traction than the rest of the platform

A reliable, free API to instantly pull Open Graph data and clean preview images is exactly the kind of utility tool developers love to keep in their back pocket. Big congrats on the launch! Are there any specific rate limits on the free tier that we should watch out for?

This is really helpful, used Apple Mail Link Preview as a quick fix until now.

The "works directly from the browser, no proxy server required" part caught my eye. If the key is callable client-side, how are you handling abuse? Per-origin rate limits, domain allowlists on the key, something else? Asking because that's usually the exact reason these APIs force you through a backend.And the edge-case pain is real. OG scraping looks like an afternoon project right up until you meet sites that render every meta tag client-side, or lie in them. Purpose-built handlers for the big offenders is the honest solution even if it's the unglamorous one.Generous free tier. Congrats on the launch, Johnny.

me getting twenty thousand free previews makes this easy to test in real projects. will you add custom cache controls? that could help developers refresh updated page content faster.

Being able to call it straight from the browser is great, but some of us will want server-side requests too. Adding a small Node.js or Python SDK would make it way easier to batch-prefetch previews when saving bookmarks or generating OG images.

Johnny you're doing great here!Saw the demo video quite minimal and engaging and also u were smart that you kept it under 30 sec cause more than that no one's watches it but one feedback for u is you should add a voice over using ai or something it would have made this to studio quality!

This is one of those “simple until you actually build it” problems. We’ve had to think about link previews, favicons, og images, and weird URL edge cases while building our product, and it gets messy very quickly. every site seems to have its own little way of breaking the “just fetch the metadata” idea :)The dedicated handling for sites like YouTube, Amazon, Twitter/X, Airbnb, etc. is probably the real value here. reliable previews matter a lot when the link card is part of the product experience, not just a nice extra. Also, 20,000 free previews is pretty generous for builders starting out. Curious how you handle websites that block scraping or return different metadata depending on JS/user-agent/location. does the API normalize that automatically, or do developers still need fallback logic?

Hey Product Hunt 👋I'm Johnny, founder of the team behind the Link Preview API.We built this because for such a simple thing, it's extremely tedious and painful to cover all of the weird edge cases on the internet, and it shouldn't be something you need to pay for when starting out.So we decided to make something radically simple... and completely free, up to 20,000+ requests per month.Just send a GET request with any URL and get back everything you need. Get structured JSON with the title, description, og:image, favicon, image dimensions, and site name. We handle all of the headache-inducing proxy-rotation, JavaScript rendering and more, including purpose-built integrations for YouTube, Amazon, Twitter, and a fair few other sites that need special treatment.Link Preview is part of the broader Exabase platform, so the same API key also gets you full page extraction, document parsing, and deep search if you ever need to go further. But it works perfectly well on its own.Thanks for taking a look – I'll be here all day to answer your comments!Johnny