GoFullPage - Full Page Screen Capture

I took a lot of time over the past year to work on various things by myself. I found working alone to be a lot more difficult for me personally than being in a buzzing office surrounded by people, but it was also a nice time to work on whatever I wanted.

The userbase of Full Page Screen Capture had grown considerably from when I first built it to over 3 million users. Various people had been reaching out to me hoping to scoop up this project and monetize it for themselves, but I wanted to give it a shot myself.

During this time I built out an editing and annotating tool for Full Page Screen Capture that lets users do such things as crop screenshots; add text, shapes, and emojis; and add the browser UI and padding around the screenshot. It was really fun to build this out and get things like alignment guides, undo/redo, emoji support detection, resizing shapes, etc. all working.

I also built out a website to manage subscriptions, allowing me to offer premium features within the extension. https://gofullpage.com/ I took this as an opportunity to learn about static sites + lambda functions as an architecture for websites.

After numerous rounds of testing and tweaks, I finally launched this publicly to all my users. Given the sheer number of existing free users, I was definitely very nervous about launching something that wasn’t polished enough, even though I knew the endlessly repeated advice of launching something as soon as possible. I think ultimately I was too cautious and should have released it sooner, but I am a firm believer in almost any situation that late is better than never.

I settled for now on the price of $12/yr (i.e., $1/mo) after doing some pricing AB tests and hoping that the numbers will work out with my scale.

I have more that I want to add to improve the experience, and I’m excited to share those features with users when they’re ready!

In the meantime, I hope people find these new tools useful. Wish me luck!

I was in a predicament where I was responsible for making and printing out a poster for an event, but I had made the mistake of building my design as a webpage. I quickly realized that webpages do not print out the way they look on your screen. So, I then checked the Chrome web store, assuming that there must be an extension that will screenshot a full webpage for me. I quickly discovered that all the extensions I tried failed to properly stitch the various sections of the page together. So, as a foolhardy software developer, I decided to keep marching forward and wrote my own Chrome extension to screenshot a full webpage. "Full Page Screenshot" was already taken, so I named it "Full Page Screen Capture" (very creative, right?)

I posted the initial code on github, wrote a blog post here: https://mrcoles.com/full-page-screen-capture-chrome-extension/ and so began the story of Full Page Screen Capture 🤓