Websites change constantly.
New homepage.
New pricing.
New positioning.
New design.
New product.
New company.
But unless someone deliberately captures those changes, most of that history disappears.
So here’s the idea:
A tool that creates a visual timelapse of how a website evolved over time.
The simple version
Give it a URL.
The service takes screenshots on a schedule:
- Daily
- Weekly
- Monthly
- On every detected change
Then it turns those screenshots into:
- A visual timeline
- Before/after comparisons
- GIFs
- Videos
- Shareable pages
So instead of saying:
We’ve completely changed our product over the last three years.
you can show it.
That could be useful for:
- Startups
- Designers
- Agencies
- Product teams
- Marketers
- Founders
- Investors
- Competitive research
The more interesting version: use Git history
You don’t necessarily have to wait years to create the timelapse.
If the website lives in GitHub, you could potentially reconstruct the past.
Connect a repository.
Pick a date range.
The service checks out versions of the site from different commits, builds them, renders the pages and takes screenshots.
You could generate:
How our homepage evolved from our first commit to Series A
in a few minutes.
That feels much more interesting than simply storing screenshots going forward.
The user could choose:
- Every major commit
- One screenshot per week
- One screenshot per month
- Releases/tags only
- Specific pages
Then export a polished video.
Who would actually pay?
This is the question I’d test before building much.
Agencies
An agency could show:
Before we redesigned it → after we redesigned it.
Or create a timelapse of a client project evolving from first prototype to launch.
That could become useful marketing content.
Startups
Founders love retrospective content.
Here’s what our homepage looked like when we had 10 users.
A product could automatically create this history for them.
Designers
Designers could turn months of work into a portfolio artifact without manually digging through screenshots.
Competitive intelligence
This is potentially a completely different product:
Tell me whenever a competitor changes its pricing page, homepage or positioning.
Now the screenshot history becomes business intelligence rather than content creation.
That may ultimately be worth more.
Don’t build the whole thing first
I’d test the output manually.
Find 10 interesting companies with a long public history.
Use archived screenshots or Git history where available.
Create videos like:
How Linear’s homepage evolved over five years
or:
The evolution of Stripe’s pricing page
Post them.
See whether anyone cares.
The content itself becomes the market test.
If one gets shared heavily, you have evidence that people like the output.
Then contact agencies and startups:
I can generate one of these automatically from your website or GitHub history. Want one?
Charge for it.
Market tests I’d run
1. Sell a one-off timelapse
Offer:
Your website’s history as a 30-second video — €49
Do it manually for the first customers.
If people won’t buy the finished result, don’t build the automation.
2. Make examples for famous companies
Create 10 visually interesting timelapses.
Post them on X, LinkedIn, Reddit and design communities.
Measure shares, clicks and requests—not just likes.
3. Contact agencies
Send 30 web/design agencies an example.
Pitch:
Automatically turn every client redesign into before/after marketing content.
See if agencies want this repeatedly.
4. Test the GitHub angle
Find founders with public repos.
Offer to reconstruct their website from different points in Git history.
The pitch:
I’ll turn your first 100 commits into a visual evolution of your product.
If people immediately want one, that’s a good sign.
What I’d build first
If there is demand, I would keep the first product tiny:
- Connect URL or GitHub repo
- Choose dates
- Render screenshots
- Generate timelapse
- Download/share
That’s enough.
No AI dashboard.
No collaboration suite.
No complicated editor.
The result is the product.
Why I like this idea
It has one very useful quality:
The output is naturally shareable.
Every timelapse someone publishes can advertise the tool that created it.
That gives the product some built-in distribution.
I also like that there are several directions it could go:
- Fun $29 tool for founders
- Agency marketing product
- Designer portfolio tool
- Website archive
- Competitor monitoring
- Product-development history from Git
I wouldn’t decide which one is the business in advance.
Make a few timelapses.
Show them to people.
Try to sell one.
Then let reality decide.