Website time-travel

Capture how a site looked in the past using the Wayback Machine — the only mainstream screenshot API with built-in historical rendering (other screenshot APIs only capture the live page). Give a url, a timeScale (year or month) and periodsBack, and the API finds a snapshot per period and screenshots each. Each period charges one unit.periodsBack accepts up to 20 years or 36 months. Available from the Pro plan — lower plans receive 403 FEATURE_NOT_IN_PLAN.

Example

curl -X POST https://screenshotforweb.com/api/v1/web-archive/screenshots \
  -H "X-API-Key: sk_live_your_key" -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"url":"https://sonarsource.com","timeScale":"year","periodsBack":3,"format":"png"}'

Which snapshot you get

Every page has its own history, so https://stripe.com/pricing returns the pricing page over time rather than the homepage (the query string and fragment are ignored). For each period the API takes the capture of that exact page closest to the middle of the period, and checks the page the Wayback Machine actually served before saving it. A period with no capture of the page is skipped with a reason instead of being filled with a capture from another year. Each image comes with its real capture time in snapshotDate.

Long jobs

Capturing many periods can take a while — use POST /web-archive/jobs to run it asynchronously and poll for results, the same way as bulk screenshots.