How I Built 10 Developer APIs in One Week on a Single VPS

Last week I challenged myself: ship one API product per day, all on the same $10/month VPS. Here's exactly how I did it and what I learned. The Stack Runtime: Node.js + Express Browser automation: Puppeteer (for screenshots, PDFs, font detection, visual diffs) Image processing: Sharp Database: SQLite (via better-sqlite3) Reverse proxy: Caddy with wildcard SSL ( *.grabshot.dev ) Process manager: PM2 Payments: Stripe Total infrastructure cost: about $10/month for the VPS + domain. The Products Day 1: GrabShot (Screenshot API) The flagship. Send a URL, get a screenshot. curl "https://grabshot.dev/v1/screenshot?url=https://news.ycombinator.com&apiKey=YOUR_KEY" -o screenshot.png Features: full-page capture, custom viewports, dark mode, element selection, retina, format selection (PNG/JPEG/WebP). The tricky part was handling all the edge cases: cookie banners, lazy-loaded content, sites that require scrolling to render, SPAs that need JS execution time. I ended up with a configurable waitUnt