My chrome-aws-lambda function had been running fine for about eight months. Then Chrome shipped a new major version, the pinned Chromium binary in my layer went stale, pages started rendering with missing fonts, and the Lambda cold starts crept from two seconds up to nearly nine. I spent a weekend rebuilding the layer, swapping to @sparticuz/chromium , and arguing with webpack about why puppeteer-core kept bundling things it shouldn't.

That was the third time in two years I'd done some version of that weekend. At that point I started seriously looking at Puppeteer Lambda alternatives, because the pattern was clear: running headless Chrome inside a 250MB function limit is a thing you can make work, but it's not a thing that stays working without active maintenance.

This article is about what I moved to instead. It's specifically for people who have a working Puppeteer-on-Lambda setup that's getting expensive to maintain, or who are about to build one and want to know if there's a less painful option.…