# Build brief — a focused alternative to Orshot > **Verdict:** Partly, if you narrow it · **Buildability:** 49/100 · **Category:** Automation > **Source:** https://www.canitbevibecoded.com/orshot > Independent editorial assessment from Can It Be Vibe Coded? Not affiliated with, endorsed by, or derived from Orshot. Verify current pricing and capabilities before acting. ## Context **Orshot** — Template driven image, video, and PDF generation you call from an API, a workflow, or an AI agent. It currently costs $39/mo. The render itself is not the moat. Headless Chromium plus a Handlebars template gets you a PNG or a PDF from JSON with a focused implementation, and for one team rendering its own OG images that really is the whole job. What does not fall out of a focused implementation is everything around the render: a visual editor non engineers can use, one design that re solves cleanly into a story, a square, and an OG card, workflows that fire on a schedule or a webhook against Sheets and Airtable, publishing into 15 plus social platforms, and a render farm that stays warm and predictable under burst. Build it if you own the templates and the volume is small. Keep paying if the people making the creatives do not write HTML. This brief describes a focused, single-operator replacement for the part of Orshot that is genuinely reproducible. It is deliberately narrower than the product it replaces, and it says so in writing. Build the useful core; do not pretend to have rebuilt the rest. ## What you are building Fill an HTML template with JSON, render it in headless Chromium at a fixed viewport, return PNG or PDF over HTTP, and batch a CSV through the same path. - Automate a small number of known workflows with logs, retries, and manual recovery. - A responsive interface with real empty, loading, success, and error states. ## Requirements ### Functional - Headless Chromium (Playwright or Puppeteer). - A template language and a place to store templates. - A warm browser pool and a render queue. - Font and brand asset handling. - Object storage plus a CDN for delivery. - A host that tolerates burst traffic. ### Non-functional - Accessibility: semantic markup, labelled controls, visible focus, and reduced-motion support. - Security: server-side secrets, validated input, and no credentials in the client bundle. - Reliability: retries with backoff on external calls, and a clear failure state when a provider is down. - Portability: the operator can export their data and leave without losing it. ## Implementation brief Build me a local templated image and PDF render service to replace an image generation API. Requirements: - Node 22 with Express in a single server.js, plus Playwright driving Chromium. No build step, no framework, no database. - A template is a folder at templates// holding index.html with Handlebars placeholders, style.css, and meta.json with width, height, and defaults. - Ship 3 starters: an OG card at 1200x630, an Instagram square at 1080x1080, and a one page invoice that renders to PDF. - POST /render {template, modifications, format} returns PNG, JPEG, or PDF. Fill the template, set the viewport from meta.json, screenshot the page. PDFs go through page.pdf() instead. - GET /render/