Show HN: Link Preview (Unfurl/Expand) API

Hi, one of the authors here. We originally built this link preview API for our own apps. (A link preview shows a summary of the page referenced by a URL. Given a link, our API will return the corresponding title, author, publisher, and so on.) Since it worked well for us, we figured why not make it available to everyone?

The reason we decided to build our own (there are several out there) is that we wanted to pull all the data a publisher wanted to share, including all the media, and we wanted it to be fast. Specially, we wanted to edge cache that data as aggressively as possible given the source.

Hopefully, others find this useful. Let us know if there are features you'd like to see. We also launched this on RapidAPI, so let us know if you've had good or bad experience using that platform. This is our first API launch, so we're still figuring out the best way to do this. Thank you!

> After that, pricing starts at $25 per month for up to 15,000 requests.

This is very expensive for any decent usage. I have used tools like metascraper for this purpose and it worked pretty well. Setup just requires throwing a tiny nodejs app on a raspberry pi or $5 server and that can handle tons of requests.

https://github.com/microlinkhq/metascraper

I’m an iframely customer, how does this compare?

I love the idea.

One suggestion for the marketing site, it'd be really cool to be able to input a url and test out the service directly/conveniently

I absolutely love this idea! I’d happily pay for this.