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by angilly 3724 days ago
Disclaimer up front; party in back: I'm about to discuss a freemium service that I built & operate related to this :)

I looked around for a solution like this for a while last year while building a new weekly email for Ramen[1]. I tried a bunch of services but ran up against a bunch of issues mentioned in this thread:

- GET query string character limit

- Stress around unreliability of free alternatives

- Need to be able to handle large spikes of image generation when sending emails

So I ended up building a service and turning it into a freemium product: ChartURL.com[2]

It is:

- Free for low usage w/ branding

- Based on C3.js[3] (for major flexibility)

- Supports datamaps.github.io[4]

- Has an API whereby you can POST huge datasets and get back a short URL that can be used in an img tag

- Supports retina & `srcset` via a `retina=1` option

You need to sign the URLs which means it's not a simple "just drop the data in the URL" but it's close.

I'll hang out in the comments here for a while if any of you want to ask questions about it.

[1] https://ramen.is

[2] https://charturl.com

[3] http://c3js.org/reference.html

[4] http://datamaps.github.io