BetterImage

Every side project I run has the same boring problem - link previews. You ship a feature, post the link, and it shows up on X or LinkedIn as a naked URL with no image, because nobody on a one-person team has time to open a design tool for every single page.

I kept solving it badly. Static placeholder images, screenshots, one sad default og:image reused across a whole site. At some point I realized I'd rather spend two weeks solving it properly than keep feeling that small shame every time I shared a link.

So I built betterimage.io.

The core idea is simple, you design a social card once, in a browser editor and then you stop thinking about it. The editor is free and doesn't ask you to sign up. You pick a template, type your headline, drop in a photo if you want one and download a 1200x630 PNG. What you see in the preview is exactly the file you get, because the preview IS the render, not an approximation of it.

The part I actually built this for is the API. You save your design as a template and from then on your site generates its own images. There are two ways to use it: a signed URL you put straight into your og:image meta tag, so each page renders its card on the fly or a REST call that returns the PNG so you can generate at build time and host it yourself. Renders take around 15 milliseconds, so everything is synchronous. No queues, no polling, no webhooks. You ask for an image, you get an image.

One design decision I'm curious about feedback on, the API can only change the text. Title, description, tag, author. Colors, fonts, layout and images stay locked to the template. That's on purpose, so every generated image stays on brand even when it's a script doing the generating, but I keep wondering if people will want more control per request.

Under the hood it's Elixir with a small Rust rendering service. No headless browser anywhere in the pipeline, which is why it's fast and why the server bill stays boring.

It's early. Free tier with a small watermark, paid plans if you need volume, a one-time option if you literally need one clean image. There's also a free link preview checker on the site that shows how any URL renders on X, Facebook, LinkedIn, Slack and Discord, and tells you what's broken. I built it as a marketing tool, honestly, but it's turned out genuinely useful for debugging my own pages.

I'm using it for my own projects daily now, which was the whole point. But I'd love outside eyes. If you run a blog, a SaaS or anything with more than a handful of pages, what would it take for this to fit into your workflow?