Stop maintaining Puppeteer infrastructure: use a screenshot API instead

Stop Maintaining Puppeteer Infrastructure: Use a Screenshot API Instead You added Puppeteer to your project for one reason: generate a screenshot or a PDF. Three months later, your Docker image is 800MB heavier, your CI pipeline takes twice as long, and you've debugged three separate memory leak incidents in production. Puppeteer is a great tool. But running it in production is infrastructure work — and for many use cases, that work is disproportionate to what you actually need. This post covers when to keep Puppeteer and when to replace it with a hosted API. The actual cost of running Puppeteer in production Memory Chromium is a memory hog. A Puppeteer instance handling concurrent requests needs 300–800MB of RAM just for the browser. If you're on a small instance (512MB, 1GB), you're competing with your application for memory. Common symptoms: OOM kills in the middle of requests Container restarts under load Memory gradually growing until the process dies (browser never fully releases