The Hidden Costs of Building Your Own Link Unfurling Service

Many developers start by thinking link unfurling is just a simple HTTP request. But once you move past the proof of concept, hidden costs start to pile up.

1. Infrastructure Costs

Fetching thousands of URLs reliably requires:

2. Maintenance Overhead

Sites change markup frequently. You’ll need to update your parser logic, handle edge cases, and monitor failures constantly.

3. Performance Trade-offs

Requests can take several seconds to complete. Caching strategies and background jobs are essential to avoid slowing down your app.

4. Privacy and Compliance

Storing URL data or user queries requires you to think about GDPR and other privacy laws. Handling this properly adds complexity.

Why Use a Managed API?

URLPreview abstracts away all this work. You get fast, reliable previews without worrying about infrastructure or compliance.

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