An open source API for generating social images — OG IMPACT
Nearly 12 months after live coding an open source image generator for Node.js, I’m excited to announce OG IMPACT: a simple API to dynamically generate beautiful social media images! 🎉
As our social feeds get noisier, it's become harder and harder to stand out from the crowd. Especially for platforms driven by dynamic, user-generated content.
Adding relevant Open Graph tags to your pages is considered one of the best ways to address this (Tumblr boosted their social CTR 2.5x), and the right image can make your content pop when it's shared. But if that content is dynamic, manually creating images for each page isn't an option.
OG IMPACT makes generating unique Open Graph images as simple as making a GET request: https://ogi.sh/?title=Hello World.
This product is built for developers. No JavaScript snippets, no backend integration, no image hosting necessary. Just point your meta tag to the API, and that’s it:
<meta property=“og:image” content=“https://ogi.sh?title=Hello%20World” />
You also get unlimited image requests, so it doesn’t matter how much your page is shared. This is thanks to an infinitely scalable serverless caching architecture powered by Saasify.
It's small but mighty:
- Near-zero code integration
- Free template gallery
- Unlimited image requests
- Custom templates with HTML + CSS
- Codepen-style template editor
- 100% open source
OG IMPACT for Individuals & small teams
OG IMPACT is totally free to get started with, offering a free template gallery to rapidly generate images for your site. No sign-up needed.
Simply call the public API to generate an image: https://ogi.sh?title=Hello World.
You can also customise the free templates by adding query params to the URL. Let's change the background using the unsplashId param:
Or add a logo URL using the logo param:
Got some richer content? An article perhaps? Check out the article template:
Or even this jaunty little number, the fiftyfifty template:
Once you've found something you like, let social media platforms know about it by adding the <meta /> tags to your page <head />:
<meta property=“og:image” content=“https://ogi.sh?title=Hello%20World” />
To add more services like Twitter, check out the docs.
You're also able to share these image URLs directly or upload them to cloud storage if you need to.
OG IMPACT for business
You already have an awesome brand, so why not show it off?
OG IMPACT supports building custom HTML + CSS templates via a Codepen-style template editor for when a free template doesn't quite cut it.
Customer showcase
wellpaid.io
OG IMPACT's first customer? Me! I run wellpaid.io and have thousands of dynamic pages that need rich social images. This is the whole reason I built OG IMPACT. Here's my template in action:
Offset Earth
My first real paying customer, the awesome team over at Offset Earth. I landed this customer before launching! Their CTO got in touch back when I was live coding the OSS library that became OG IMPACT.
Offset Earth use it to show off how many trees you've planted:
Sounds good, where do I start?
Head over to https://ogimpact.sh now to get going for free with the template gallery. That's free forever.
Custom templates start at $19.99/mo, and I'll even help you design and build one for $99.99/mo.
I'm always on hand to answer any questions or take feature requests via the open source project.
Very cool!
I'm a big fan of Open Source monetizing via managed services.
What are your marketing channel ideas?
Jonathan
Initially going to focus on growing free users with indie devs, writing content for them and hanging out in indie communities.
Then there's a viral aspect to it, because all free images are watermarked with the site URL. This should drive more traffic, and I'm hoping some of it will convert.
Beyond that, content for startups and SMEs. I might also generate example template designs and do some warm/cold emails.
Very cool, I'm wondering if they're the ones with the biggest need.
Have you thought of approaching online bloggers and writers?
They have a lot of traffic/eye balls - if you could tailor your solution to give them a quick fix for their posts, that might help.
How about e-commerce? They got hundreds of products and they need to generate these social images of their products somehow? Maybe Shopify extension or something?
I know that Jon over at Bannerbear gave a Shopify extension a go, and recently sunset it after finding customers too demanding and low value. He talks about it here: https://www.indiehackers.com/product/mojosaas/launched-my-api-and-shut-down-my-shopify-app--M2CybHO6hWH_0q6jm2d
Having said that, OG IMPACT does require significantly less integration, so could potentially work there.
Definitely a niche I've thought about! This system should work for any site that's driven by dynamic content.
Any resources for how to reach them?
This Podcast opened my eyes to a whole world of online reporters and how to reach them:
https://www.indiehackers.com/podcast/142-dmitry-dragilev-of-just-reach-out
Let's have a quick chat about it - I'd love to spitball a few ideas - https://calendly.com/jonathanoron (free of course!)
How generous of you! I've popped something in for next Wednesday.
Looking forward to it! :)
Great post and beautiful work! This is unrelated but have you seen much demand for no-code contractors on wellpaid.io?
Appreciate that!
And honestly I haven't really analysed that, but I think it's unlikely since almost all the positions must contain technical tags like "React.js". No-code contract positions is an interesting concept. What no-code job sites do you know of?
💯i see a few pop up here and there but i haven't seen anything really high quality. would love to chat more and see if this is a good opportunity to collab on because wellpaid.io is so nice looking!
This is interesting. Want to ping my on LinkedIn and we can chat about it? http://linkedin.com/in/chrisvilla/
sent 👍
Wow, congratulations! this looks amazing
Out of curiosity: say I publish a new post on a blog & share it automatically to social media sites without accessing it before, would ogimpact generate the image(s) fast enough for the networks to display them or would I need to access the post myself first so that the images are generated & cached.
Aha thank you!
The first load definitely takes a little longer, but it's still fast enough. None of the images on the wellpaid.io twitter feed are pre-rendered, but they show just fine: https://twitter.com/wellpaidio
That's great news. Thanks for clarifying
This is amazing! 🎗
Unfortionally I don't use nearly enough headers to justify the price, but great work! Wish I'd come up with this idea 🔥
Will definitely try the free version.
:) Thanks mate! The pro tiers are really aimed at sites with loads of pages. I'm @chrisvxd on Twitter if you have any issues.