Developer tools decision
SiteHaul
A technical user can reproduce the core functionality (local full-site screenshots and Markdown export) in about a week; SiteHaul's main durable advantage is the polished notarized Mac app and license UX, not hard-to-replicate infrastructure.
Visit website↗Built by Dave Ships, who ships 4 products in this index
Not priced
No pricing page we fetched carried a figure, so there is nothing to compare against. The build side is still real.
$50one-off30 h to build
$0/mo1 h/mo upkeep
No published price to break even against.
Open-source builds that already do this
Every project below is open source and already does this job today. Fork one, self-host it, or take the parts you need - the build prompt further down assumes an empty file, and this is the shortcut past that. Licences differ; check the one on each card before you ship. All SiteHaul alternatives, with the arithmetic →
What a replacement has to do
- Crawl a site's sitemap (or accept a list of URLs), render each page in a headless browser at desktop and mobile viewports while forcing lazy-loaded content and clicking cookie banners, capture full-page screenshots and extract page copy to Markdown, save files named from URLs and package into a folder/ZIP.
What it still won’t have
- Mac App Bundle experience (signed/notarized installer and one-click updates)
- Polished GUI for selecting pages and unticking sections
- Built-in license key activation across multiple Macs
- Marketing, brand, and existing user feedback-driven polish
What remains hard
- Execution quality
Notarized by Apple. Opens cleanly, no security warnings.
First-year cost
No published price
SiteHaul does not publish a price we could read, so there is nothing to compare against. What building costs is below.
Money you would actually spend
Time you would spend
—
What you would spend
What we assumed
The verdict above measures whether you could build it. This one is only about money.
Runnable build prompt
Build a macOS command-line tool (Node.js + Puppeteer) that: 1) accepts a sitemap URL or a newline list of URLs; 2) discovers and deduplicates page URLs; 3) for each URL renders the page in headless Chromium at desktop (1440x900) and mobile (390x844) viewports and captures full-page PNG screenshots; 4) implements heuristics to click common cookie banners, force lazy-loaded images to load, and freeze animations before capture; 5) extracts visible page copy and saves it as Markdown mapped to the page URL; 6) writes a structured output folder named/organised by URL and produces a ZIP and a contact-sheet gallery; 7) logs progress, retries transient failures, and records any pages flagged by basic login-wall detection; out of scope: macOS notarization, GUI installer, license key handling. Include error handling, unit and integration tests for sitemap parsing, rendering, and file I/O, and a README with usage and install steps.
How we checked
How the score was reached
- Build verdict base78
- An open-source build was found+5
- 4 cited sources+3
- Price verified on pricing page+3
- 3/3 assessment runs agreed+4
- Evidence score93
The base comes from the verdict. Everything under it is a check that either happened or did not, and each one is a fact frozen in this record rather than a judgement made at render time - so the same evidence always produces the same number.
How scoring works →Cited sources · 4
Every page the run actually retrieved.
- official productSiteHaul homepage
- official pricingSiteHaul pricing area
- open sourcesimonw/shot-scraper
- open sourcesindresorhus/pageres-cli
Integrity checks
What held up, and what did not.
