Changelog

What changed in the Shotlane API, MCP server and site. Details for every option are in the docs.

October 19, 2026

Free tier: every account now gets 100 free renders a month, not only at signup. On the first request each month, a balance below 100 is topped back up to 100. Credits you buy still never expire.

What AI agents see on 60 AI and SaaS homepages: AI crawler rules, llms.txt, JavaScript-only content and bot walls, with the raw data.

AI readiness checker: what ChatGPT, Claude and Perplexity can see on a page (AI crawler rules, llms.txt, JavaScript-only content, bot walls). The same report is available as /v1/report.
Open Graph checker: the link preview card, missing tags and og:image size.
All tools are now on one tools page.

POST /v1/screenshots: one page on several devices in one call.
Monitors can also be added, checked, paused and deleted from the dashboard, with the change images shown inline.
/v1/monitors: watch a page hourly, every 6 hours, daily or weekly and get an email or webhook when it changes, with the changed pixels marked or a text diff.
POST /v1/crawl: crawl a site breadth-first (up to 500 pages, depth, include/exclude patterns, sitemap seeding, robots.txt respected) and get every page as Markdown in one ZIP.
/v1/report: AI-readiness and link-preview report for a URL.
POST /v1/bulk: up to 500 URLs per job as PNG, JPEG, PDF or Markdown, one ZIP at the end, per-URL results, and an optional webhook signed with your API key.
/v1/map: a site's URLs from the links on a page plus its sitemaps, with a search filter.
/v1/scrape: values out of a page with CSS selectors, returned as JSON.

PDF links now come back as Markdown on /v1/markdown, /v1/extract, /md/ and the MCP read_page tool.
/v1/extract returns page metadata (Open Graph and Twitter tags, canonical URL, favicon, language, HTTP status) and can add every link, the rendered HTML or plain text. exclude_selectors and max_chars keep the Markdown short.
News and landing pages return their headlines instead of a single paragraph.
Cookie banners no longer end up in the Markdown.

Emulation: timezone, locale, latitude/longitude, reduced_motion, media_type=print, disable_js.
Blocking: block_trackers, block_chats, block_requests (URL patterns), block_resources (images, fonts, scripts…).
Interaction: hover, scroll_into_view, wait_to_leave (for spinners), hide_popups for sign-in and newsletter modals.
Formats: avif (far smaller than PNG) and mhtml (a single-file web archive of the page).
Output: clip_* regions, image_width/image_height thumbnails, and response_type=json for a hosted link instead of the file.
PDF: watermarks, password protection (AES-256) and document metadata.
Upload results straight to your own S3, R2, B2 or MinIO bucket with storage_* parameters.
PDF: margins, page numbers, header and footer templates, page ranges, scale and custom page sizes. markdown input turns a Markdown report into a styled PDF or image.
Access: basic_auth, your own proxy, and a timeout setting.
fail_on_status and fail_if_content_contains turn error pages into failed renders, which are not charged. Every response now carries X-Target-Status.

When a site answers with a bot-protection page (Cloudflare, DataDome, Akamai and others), the response says so in X-Shotlane-Blocked. Such results are never cached. Self-solving challenges get up to 12 seconds first.
Full-page captures include sections that only appear while scrolling.
block_ads also removes the empty boxes ads leave behind.
Pages that never finish loading are captured once they have content, and a render can no longer hang.

Single-file Python and Node clients with no dependencies: /sdk/shotlane.py and /sdk/shotlane.mjs.

MCP screenshot: tall full-page captures arrive as readable slices instead of one image shrunk until the text is gone.
MCP html_to_pdf accepts Markdown, margins and page numbers. read_page takes max_chars.
Keyless /md/ and /shot/ send X-RateLimit-* headers, and /md/ answers JSON for Accept: application/json.

Launch: screenshots, PDFs and Markdown over HTTP, a remote MCP server with OAuth, signed URLs, caching, bulk jobs in the dashboard, and prepaid credits that never expire.