Bannerbear.com can help you there - we generate PNGs / PDFs based on data you send us either via API or Zapier. Would be very simple to set up what you're describing :)
I'm the 2nd example in the post (Bannerbear.com) and I wasn't in a full time job when I started it. There was definitely a feeling of existential motivation...
I was completely lost with AWS lambda until I discovered https://serverless.com - the fact that you haven't found them yourself suggests they need to do a much better job of marketing themselves!
I run my lambdas locally with a single command: serverless offline
If the lambda has an http endpoint, it creates the endpoint at localhost/<endpoint> and I'm good to go, it even does live reloading as I edit my code.
If the lambda runs off AWS events, I can invoke the lambda locally with a command, and point it to a JSON file of a simulated AWS event. I get my local rails app to create these AWS event JSON files, so that I can test end to end locally. Works well for my purposes.
To deploy I just run: serverless deploy --stage production
Which sets up all the necessary additional services like API Gateway, cloudwatch etc.
- daily spending on goods and services
- electronic transfers to ewallets*
- any time someone needs to send me money, I use transferwise virtual account details so from their end it seems like a domestic transfer
- I even bought a motorcycle using Transferwise to do a local bank transfer. Tried it with my regular (foreign) bank first and it failed, tried it with Transferwise and it worked fine.
*my traditional bank doesn't support this. They only know how to deposit to a domestic ewallet, Transferwise can do deposits in ewallets internationally
For people who are on the trial and need more quota, I simply tell them they are welcome to create 2nd, 3rd etc accounts. I have no issue with that.
"How much free quota" to give is a question with no right answer. So instead of forever trying to tweak that number, I have left it at an amount that seems to be working and I don't increase it for anyone (I have not even built in the ability to extend a free trial).
There's still a lot to be optimized on the video side of things. But the reason it took 2 minutes is because of things like:
- Checking the video length before rendering
- Converting to a standardized format so that the renderer doesn't trip up
- Handing off to AWS Lambda, which involves some network I/O
- Handing back to my Rails app
So there's a lot of back-and-forth right now that could be optimized.
It will scale nicely under high workloads because my main Rails app isn't really doing much except handing off to AWS Lambda, but this means there is a speed hit both in terms of the I/O and also the Lambda being underpowered.
You can actually see the two main processes happening if you watch the progress bar on the video demo.
You'll notice that the first 50% is a bit slow - that's my Rails app doing some validations, conversions, and packaging things up nicely for the Lambda.
The last 50% seems to move faster - that's the Lambda rendering the final video and then passing it back to Rails.
There's definitely a lot of scope for speeding things up in the first 50%.
As for disrupting long-running processes, I can safely deploy my Rails app any time as it's not performing any of the rendering jobs (on images or video) it's just acting as the job expeditor and receiver of webhooks.
I agree with you, automated open graph images are not a problem worth paying lots of money to solve. That's pretty much the exact realisation I had at the mid point in this timeline - see the "Rebrand" section for the details.
So at that point I pivoted Bannerbear to be able to generate any kind of image, for any purpose.
New use cases are things like, generating ad variations, generating instagram posts, generating dynamic in-app images (e.g. in the welcome email for Bannerbear you get a personalized image header which is generated on-the-fly by Bannerbear) and these use cases are a lot more valuable to the end users.
Basically anyone who needs to do repetitive image generation.
The idea came from when I was working in Ecommerce. We would be uploading anywhere from 5 to 50 new products to our store every day. And those products would have multiple photos (different angle views). And from those different views, we would be manually creating all sorts of marketing assets e.g. ads, social media posts etc.
On top of the image, we would usually want to overlay things like our logo, or a coupon code, or the product name etc. All of this stuff was done manually and it was a PITA.
So my product is aimed at two types of customer,
1) the above type of user who needs some kind of highly-scalable and flexible banner generation API. Digital ad agencies, ecommerce stores.
2) a lower volume type of customer who wants to do the same but at a smaller scale, maybe for their own solo business. These customers use Zapier to integrate with Bannerbear, rather than using the API directly.
It's a good question. My churn rate is still quite high at around 10%. So I definitely cannot coast, I have to actively market and make sure my growth is higher than my churn.
When I take my foot off the pedal and stop marketing, I feel it - I get less targeted signups and less conversions.
So this is a full time job right now, it's not a "set and forget" style business!
Actually Bannerbear generates any image of any size, for any purpose :)
Open Graph images is one use-case, but it's actually quite a small niche within my current customers.
The most common use case is people who have spreadsheets full of data that they want to turn into some sort of image, like a product catalog in an excel sheet that you want to turn into social media posts.
Another use case is any time in an app where you need to generate an image on-demand. For example if you're sending a weekly summary email to your SaaS users and you want to generate some sort of dynamic image to show their usage stats (with charts / metrics etc).
I arrived in Bali, Indonesia at the start of the pandemic with a 6 month visa. A few months in they started granting emergency extensions to anyone who wanted to stay (getting a flight home was tricky at that time, and still is).
Lots of people left but a core of nomads and expats have remained.
They have since slowly begun to dial back the giving out of emergency visa extensions but you can still get a new visa through the normal process. There are even people arriving in Bali recently, on newly-issued visas from overseas.
The scene is obviously quieter here now. There are no tourists, only nomads and retirees who live here.
Bannerbear.com can help you there - we generate PNGs / PDFs based on data you send us either via API or Zapier. Would be very simple to set up what you're describing :)
Some tutorials to browse: https://www.bannerbear.com/resources/nocode/tutorials/