What makes this different from other screenshot APIs?

Most of them return the page with the cookie banner still on it. We benchmarked a 29-URL corpus: 93% of renders technically succeeded, but only 69% were images you could actually use. Seven were ruined by consent overlays and exactly one by bot protection. rendershed treats that gap as the product.

Does it click “Accept all” on cookie banners?

Never. It either declines, where a genuine reject control exists, or it hides the banner cosmetically, which consents to nothing. Reject buttons that actually lead to a paid subscription are detected and skipped.

Can it screenshot pages behind bot protection?

Sometimes, and we do not claim otherwise. We measured headless, stealth and headful browsers from both residential and datacenter addresses: the browser makes no difference, the IP makes some, and a small number of sites are simply not renderable. Those return an error rather than an image of a challenge page.

Is there an MCP server?

Yes. Rendershed exposes an MCP server so an AI agent can render a page and look at it as part of a task, plus an OpenAPI description and llms.txt for discovery.

Do I need an API key to start?

No. Calls without a key run on an anonymous tier of 20 renders an hour, metered against your address, so the examples on this page work when pasted. A free key raises that to 100 a month from anywhere; paid plans run $9.99 for 3,000, $39.99 for 20,000 and $99 for 75,000. Cached renders are free at every tier and never count against a quota.

API reference

Q: How do I use it in an tag?

Mint a signed URL with POST /v1/sign and use it as the src. The signature covers every parameter, so the URL cannot be edited into a different render, and your API key never reaches the browser.

Two endpoints and one idea: give it a URL, get back an image of the page rather than of a consent wall.

Quickstart

# No key needed. Paste this as it is.
curl -X POST https://shots.rendershed.com/v1/render \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "theguardian.com/international"}' \
  -o shot.png

# A free key raises the limit from 20 renders an hour to 100 a month
# and keeps working from any address:
#   -H "X-API-Key: $RENDERSHED_KEY"

The scheme is optional — example.com works, and https is assumed, falling back to http if nothing answers.

Authentication

A key is optional. A call without one runs on the anonymous tier — 20 renders an hour, metered against your address — so every example here works pasted. A key raises the limit and detaches it from where you are calling from. Note the difference: no key is anonymous, a wrong key is rejected.

Tier	Limit	Extras
anonymous	20 / hour per IP	viewport capture only
free key	100 / month	same features, any address
paid	3,000 – 75,000 / month	base64, retina, longer cache, full page

Server to server, send your key as a header:

X-API-Key: rsk_live_...
Authorization: Bearer rsk_live_...   # either works

For an <img> tag, mint a signed URL instead so no key reaches the browser. The signature covers every parameter, so the URL cannot be edited into a different render, and signed GETs are the only responses a CDN will cache.

curl -X POST https://shots.rendershed.com/v1/sign \
  -H "X-API-Key: $RENDERSHED_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "stripe.com", "width": 1200}'

# {"url": "/v1/render?url=...&width=1200&kid=...&sig=...", "plan": "growth"}

Endpoints

Method	Path	Purpose
`POST`	`/v1/render`	Render a page. Key in a header.
`GET`	`/v1/render`	Render a page from a signed query string. CDN-cacheable.
`POST`	`/v1/sign`	Mint a signed URL.
`GET`	`/healthz`	Service and cache status.

Parameters

Name	Type	Default	Description
`url`	string	required	The page to render. http and https only.
`width`	int	1440	Viewport width, 200–3840.
`height`	int	900	Viewport height, 200–4320.
`dpr`	float	1	Device pixel ratio, up to 3.
`full_page`	bool	false	Capture the whole document, not just the viewport.
`format`	enum	png	png, jpeg or webp.
`quality`	int	—	1–100, for jpeg and webp.
`overlay_mode`	enum	dismiss	off, hide or dismiss.
`block_ads`	bool	true	Drop known ad and tracker requests.
`dark_mode`	bool	false	Render with prefers-color-scheme: dark.
`wait_for_selector`	string	—	Wait for a CSS selector before capture.
`delay_ms`	int	0	Extra settle time, up to 10000.
`locale`	string	en-US	Browser locale.
`timezone`	string	UTC	IANA timezone.
`cache_ttl`	int	86400	Seconds a render may be served from cache. Capped by your plan.
`fresh`	bool	false	Bypass the cache for this call. The result is still stored.
`response`	enum	binary	`json` returns base64 in a JSON envelope. Paid plans.

Overlay removal

overlay_mode decides how hard the renderer works to give you the page instead of what is covering it.

Mode	Behaviour
`off`	Leaves the page exactly as it loads.
`hide`	Hides known consent containers with CSS. Consents to nothing.
`dismiss`	Default. Hides, plus verified reject clicks, plus a generic modal sweep.

It never clicks “accept”. Where a reject control is really a paid upsell — the Guardian's is labelled “Reject all and subscribe” — it is detected by its own label and skipped in favour of hiding, because clicking it navigates away from the page you asked for.

Responses

By default the body is the image. Ask for JSON when your pipeline needs base64 rather than bytes:

curl -X POST https://shots.rendershed.com/v1/render \
  -H "X-API-Key: $RENDERSHED_KEY" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url": "example.com", "response": "json"}'

{
  "image_b64": "iVBORw0KGgoAAAANSUhEUg...",
  "format": "png",
  "bytes": 17883,
  "cached": false,
  "width": 1440,
  "height": 900,
  "ms": 1194
}

Header	Meaning
`X-Rendershed-Cache`	HIT or MISS. A HIT costs nothing and is not billed.
`X-Rendershed-Ms`	Render time in milliseconds, from the original render.
`X-Rendershed-Suppressed`	Which overlays were removed, or how many were hidden.
`Cache-Control`	Set on signed GET responses so a CDN can store them.

Caching

Renders are cached on the parameters that change pixels. Asking for the same image as JSON instead of binary, or with a different TTL, still hits. A cached render is free and does not count against your quota — not the monthly allowance and not the hourly limit either. It costs us a disk read, so charging for it would be charging for nothing.

Pass fresh: true to bypass the cache for one call. The result is still stored for the next one.

Errors

Status	Meaning
`400`	Invalid parameters, or a URL that will not be fetched (bad scheme, blocked port, non-public host)
`401`	No API key, or a signed URL with no signature
`402`	The plan does not include the requested feature
`403`	Invalid API key, or a signature that does not match
`429`	Quota exceeded for the hour
`502`	The page could not be rendered
`503`	The render fleet is unreachable
`504`	The render exceeded its deadline

Errors are JSON with an error field. A page behind bot protection returns a clear failure rather than an image of a challenge screen.

Plans and limits

Plan	Renders	Notes
`free`	100 / month	PNG, JPEG, WebP, Overlay removal, Signed URLs, 24-hour cache
`starter`	3,000 / month	base64 / JSON response, 7-day cache, Retina (2x) output, Email support
`growth`	20,000 / month	30-day cache, Higher concurrency, Priority queue, MCP server access
`scale`	75,000 / month	Full-page capture, 4K and 3x output, Overage at $0.001 / render, Self-hosted option

Full-page capture is Scale only: an unbounded document height is an unbounded surface to rasterise, and a long page can cost ten times a viewport capture.

MCP

An agent can call rendershed directly through the Model Context Protocol. The render_url tool returns the image plus a note about what was removed, so the agent knows whether it is looking at the page or at a wall.

https://mcp.rendershed.com/mcp    # streamable HTTP

/openapi.json OpenAPI 3.1
/llms.txt summary for models
server-card.json MCP card