How I Built a Link Preview API on Cloudflare Workers for $0

Adding link previews to a web app sounds simple until you actually try it. You need to: Fetch the target URL Parse HTML for Open Graph tags, meta tags, favicon Handle timeouts, redirects, encoding issues Optionally generate a visual preview card Cache results so you're not hammering the same URLs Most developers either self-host a scraper (hello, Puppeteer memory leaks) or pay $12-76/month for services like Microlink or OpenGraph.io. I wanted something simpler. So I built LinkPeek — a link preview API that runs entirely on Cloudflare's free tier. The Stack Cloudflare Workers — serverless compute at the edge Hono — lightweight web framework (Express-like but for Workers) D1 — SQLite database for API keys, usage tracking, and caching Total monthly cost: $0 . What It Does 1. Metadata Extraction curl "https://linkpeek-api.linkpeek.workers.dev/v1/preview?url=https://github.com&key=YOUR_KEY" Returns: { "url" : "https://github.com" , "title" : "GitHub: Let's build from here" , "description" :