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Vumbnail

Introduction

Vumbnail turns a video URL into a thumbnail image URL. You take a Vimeo or YouTube link, rewrite it as https://vumbnail.com/<video-id>.jpg, and the service returns the video’s poster frame as a real JPEG — something a browser, CMS, RSS reader, or <img> tag can use directly.

There is no API key to request, no SDK to install, and no server to run. The URL is the API. Drop it into an <img src>, an Open Graph tag, an email, or a WordPress block, and it works.

The problem it solves

Section titled “The problem it solves”

Vimeo and YouTube both have a poster image for every video, but getting at it is annoying:

  • The official paths are inconsistent between providers, change over time, and differ by size.
  • Some require an API call, an oEmbed round-trip, or scraping a player page.
  • Password-protected and unlisted videos, playlists, and deleted videos each need special handling.
  • Hotlinking the provider’s own CDN is fragile and sometimes blocked.

Vumbnail hides all of that behind one stable URL shape and serves the result from a global edge cache, so the image loads fast and keeps working even when the upstream provider is slow or rate-limiting.

What makes it different

Section titled “What makes it different”
  • It’s a URL, not an API. The integration is copy-paste. The smallest possible thing a user has to learn is “append .jpg.”
  • Edge-native. Thumbnails are resolved once and then served from Cloudflare’s cache and an R2 bucket, close to the viewer, for as long as they stay warm.
  • Freemium by watermark, not by gate. Free usage never breaks. Instead of cutting traffic off at a quota, Vumbnail keeps serving — it just switches high-volume free sites to a watermarked image, which converts them to paying customers without ever returning an error to their visitors.
  • Fails open. When anything goes wrong — a watermark transform error, an upstream block, an unknown ID — the worst case is a clean image or a small fallback graphic, never a broken <img>.

What it is not

Section titled “What it is not”
  • Not a video host or player. Vumbnail serves still images (and, when enabled, short animated previews). The video stays on Vimeo or YouTube.
  • Not a general image CDN. It is purpose-built for video poster frames.
  • Not a metered API with usage dashboards for end users. Billing is handled through a simple subscription that allow-lists your domain or IP; see Paid access & entitlements.