Link Preview API Review (2026): Pricing, Features & Honest Verdict

TLDR

Link Preview API is a developer API from Exabase that returns Open Graph data — title, description, image, and favicon — for any URL you throw at it. It handles JavaScript rendering and anti-bot evasion so you don’t have to. Best for: developers building link unfurling. Price: From $0/mo (free plan: yes, 20,000 previews). Rating: 7.7/10

What is Link Preview API?

Link Preview API is a single-endpoint REST API that takes any URL and returns the metadata you need to render a rich link card — the kind of preview you see when you paste a link into Slack, iMessage, or a tweet. Send a GET request to api.exabase.io/v2/link-preview?q=[URL] and you get back clean JSON: title, description, image URL, favicon (with dimensions and MIME types), canonical URL, locale, and site name. It also handles the annoying parts of scraping Open Graph tags in the wild — JavaScript-heavy pages, anti-bot walls, and image validation — so you don’t have to run and babysit your own headless-browser scraper.

It launched on Product Hunt on July 8, 2026, where it finished third for the day with 188 upvotes. It’s built by Exabase, a broader data-and-extraction infrastructure company that positions itself as “the data layer for agents” — the same platform sells memory, storage, deep search, and general extraction APIs. Link Preview is effectively a free, focused entry point into that stack: the API is subsidized by the wider platform, which is why the free tier is unusually generous at 20,000 previews a month.

What Are Link Preview API’s Key Features?

JavaScript rendering for dynamic pages

Plenty of modern sites inject their Open Graph tags client-side or hide content behind a single-page-app shell, which breaks naive scrapers that only read the initial HTML. Link Preview API renders JavaScript before extracting metadata, so it pulls correct previews from pages that a plain fetch would return empty. Rendering adds roughly 1-2 seconds to a fresh request, which is a fair trade for actually getting the data.

Dedicated provider handling and image validation

The API includes special-case handling for high-traffic platforms like YouTube, Amazon, Twitter, Airbnb, and SoundCloud, where generic Open Graph parsing often falls short. It also validates images — returning dimensions, file size, and MIME type — so you can filter out broken or tiny thumbnails before you render a card, and there’s optional malware and adult-content filtering.

Built-in caching and anti-bot evasion

Popular URLs are cached automatically for 24 hours, so repeat lookups return in roughly 100ms while fresh fetches take 1-3 seconds. Under the hood it rotates proxies and handles anti-bot measures to hit a claimed 95%+ success rate across the open web — the kind of infrastructure that’s genuinely tedious to build and maintain yourself.

CORS support for browser-side calls

The endpoint is CORS-enabled, so you can call it directly from a browser without standing up a proxy server, though Exabase recommends server-side calls for production to keep your API key private. A per-domain rate limit of about one request per second keeps things polite.

How Much Does Link Preview API Cost?

Link Preview API starts at $0 — the free tier includes 20,000 previews per month with no credit card required, which is enough to cover most side projects and many production apps outright. Beyond that, usage runs on Exabase’s credit system: the free plan includes 200 credits a month with extra credits at $0.02 each, and the paid Scale plan at $149/month bumps included credits to 5,000 and drops the overage rate to $0.01 per credit.

That free allotment is far more generous than most competitors. Microlink’s free tier caps you at 25 requests per day (roughly 750 a month) and its cheapest paid Pro plan is $49/month for 46,000 requests. OpenGraph.io is stingier still, offering just 100 free requests and jumping to $100/month for its Production tier. On raw free volume, Link Preview API is the clear value pick.

Who Is Link Preview API Best For?

This is a developer tool, plain and simple — it’s for engineers who need to unfurl links inside a chat app, CMS, bookmarking tool, social feed, or content aggregator and don’t want to maintain a scraper.

Use Link Preview API if you want a generous free tier, you’re tired of your homegrown Open Graph parser breaking on JavaScript-rendered sites, or you’re already in the Exabase ecosystem and want extraction and previews under one bill.

Skip Link Preview API if you need a mature, standalone service with years of uptime history, richer rendering options (like on-the-fly preview card images or PDF/screenshot capture), or you’re wary of depending on a free product that’s subsidized by a broader platform and could change terms.

Best Link Preview API Alternatives

Link unfurling is a crowded space, and a few established services are worth comparing before you commit.

Microlink

The most mature option here, Microlink normalizes metadata into clean JSON and can also generate preview images, screenshots, and PDFs. Its free tier is thin at 25 requests per day, but the $49/month Pro plan (46,000 requests) is a reasonable step up with proxy rotation and configurable caching. Pick it if you want the broadest feature set and a long track record.

OpenGraph.io

A focused Open Graph extraction API returning full OG and Twitter tag sets plus favicon and domain data. The free tier is just 100 requests and paid plans start at $100/month for 250k credits, so it’s aimed at higher-volume production users rather than tinkerers. Solid, but noticeably pricier to get started.

LinkPreview.net

A long-running, single-purpose service that does exactly one thing — return title, description, image, and URL as JSON. Its free tier allows 60 requests per hour, and paid plans scale up from there. Choose it if you want a stable, no-frills API without buying into a larger platform.

Final Verdict: Is Link Preview API Worth It?

For a free tool, Link Preview API punches well above its weight. The 20,000-preview monthly allowance is genuinely useful — it dwarfs the free tiers of Microlink and OpenGraph.io — and the feature list (JavaScript rendering, provider-specific handling, image validation, anti-bot evasion, 24-hour caching) covers the parts of link unfurling that are actually hard to build yourself. The single-GET-request API is about as simple as it gets, and CORS support means you can prototype straight from the browser.

The main caveats are maturity and dependency. It launched in July 2026, so it doesn’t have the uptime history of Microlink, and it’s a subsidized on-ramp to Exabase’s larger platform — which means the economics could shift if the company’s priorities change. If you want a rich, standalone unfurling service with image generation, Microlink is still the safer bet. But if you just need reliable Open Graph data at a price of zero for realistic volumes, Link Preview API is one of the best free developer tools we’ve come across this year, and it’s an easy recommendation to try.