How many screenshots fit in Cloudflare's free plan
Cloudflare’s Browser Rendering runs a real Chrome next to your Worker. The free Workers plan includes it, with limits that matter for a screenshot API.
The free plan
From Cloudflare’s limits page:
- 10 minutes of browser time a day. The clock runs while a browser is open, not while your Worker waits.
- 3 browsers at the same time.
- 1 new browser every 20 seconds.
The API opens a fresh browser for every shot and closes it when the shot is done. So the number of shots you get depends on how long each page takes to load, clean up and capture.
| Time per shot | Shots a day |
|---|---|
| 5 seconds | about 120 |
| 10 seconds | about 60 |
| 20 seconds | about 30 |
A plain page with a cookie banner takes a few seconds. A long page with lazy images takes longer, because the browser scrolls to the bottom first so every image loads.
The third limit sets the pace: one new browser every 20 seconds is at most 3 shots a minute.
The $5 plan
The Workers Paid plan includes 10 browser-hours a month, then $0.09 an hour, with 10 browsers at a time (pricing). Ten hours at 5 seconds a shot is about 7,200 shots a month before the hourly rate starts.
When to run it yourself instead
Cloudflare marks every request from its browser as a bot. Sites behind bot protection answer with a challenge, and the API reports that as blocked instead of returning a picture of it. If many of your URLs are like that, or you need more than the free minutes, run the Docker image on your own server. There the only limit is the machine.