Render rich link cards without running your own scraper

Exabase has a practical free Link Preview API for one of those small product features that gets ugly fast: turning arbitrary URLs into clean preview cards. Send a URL to the API and it returns metadata such as title, description, image, favicon, canonical URL, locale, site name, and image dimensions.

The useful angle is the free allowance. Exabase says the tool includes 20,000 link previews per month at no cost, with a small charge beyond that. That makes it worth testing before wiring Puppeteer, Playwright, proxy rotation, JavaScript rendering, cache handling, and image validation into your own product.

Use it for chat apps, bookmark managers, CMS link cards, curated newsletters, social schedulers, SEO checks, browser extensions, or comparison sites. Product Hunt launch context also confirms the free positioning and shows the maker framing it as a lightweight entry point into the broader Exabase extraction stack.

Check before using

• Confirm the current free limit and overage cost on Exabase before relying on it for a high-volume product.
• Test with the exact domains your app needs; link-preview APIs can still hit robots.txt, paywall, login, or metadata edge cases.
• Keep user-submitted URLs behind validation and abuse controls before fetching previews.
• Store the returned canonical URL and image dimensions so stale or malformed cards can be refreshed later.

Sources

• Exabase official tool page: free Link Preview API, 20,000 monthly previews, fields returned, use cases, caveats, and docs links.
• Product Hunt launch page: launch timing, free positioning, category context, and maker notes about the 20,000+ request allowance.