Street smart! But yes, programmatic merging does get complex, especially with large document sizes. It's a balancing act between functionality and handling those technical challenges!
It seems there isn't a solution that satisfies everyone so far, indeed. With concerns about languages supported, functionalities, security, etc., there's certainly a lot of room for improvement in this space to offer a better solution!
We've updated our pricing, and it can go as low as $0.005 per document. True, you'll still need to work with a third-party vendor, but isn't it worth considering if the features are competitive and the interface is user-friendly? It would be interesting to know what might convince you to switch from Puppeteer to another solution—or if you're completely satisfied and wouldn't switch regardless of the offerings, which is perfectly fine.
For me, it's probably not going to make sense since I already did the work. I think you should pitch it at people that don't want to bother to figure it out (could be several days of engineering time).
We've adjusted our pricing based on your comments and advice. It's not 100% free, but it now seems to make more sense to most of you. What do you think?
Exactly. We are aiming at offering a solution to build complex PDF design. Which means having 100% control over the layout (margin, header, footer), the style and also the content. That's why we integrated Tailwind, CharkraUI, Markdown, LaTeX, and also wanted to support SVG etc.
certifications (SOC2 / ISO27001) and offer an on-premise solution! I see there's already a discussion about pricing, so I'll leave that be. However, would an unlimited volume at a fixed cost (and self-host) be an attractive solution? It could be interesting for very high volumes.
I can tell you that the world I operate in will want something like what you are proposing (fixed rate + OnPrem) and the pricing is going to have a ceiling because building this in-house is a real and viable alternative. Our problem is not so much lack of talent but other product-roadmap priorities. What is the ceiling? I do not know, but can hazard a guess. 1/4th of the yearly cost of a good developer.
Thank you for taking the time. It really helps us define our value proposition and outline the next steps in product development. As you mentioned, the challenge isn't the inability to produce something in-house but rather other product-roadmap priorities. Our goal is to ensure that companies needing to produce many documents —where documents are necessary but not core to their business— can use our solution at a fair price and limiting the pain of creating such solution in house. OnPrem + fixed rate seems to be the best option for high volume. We'll explore this and see what future solutions we can offer to meet these needs!
Sorry for the misunderstanding, we indeed "meant something more like a viewer for Adobe's PDF format rather than Adobe's viewer for PDFs.". We will make sure to change the wording. Thank you!
True. Security is a significant concern, and in our discussions with businesses, we realised that most of them do not want any kind of data leaving their own systems. This is especially true in the biotech/healthcare industry, but also in legal and banking. That's why we're considering an on-premises solution for the future (as we're focusing on B2B). However, I assume most people were talking about personal use cases or non-sensitive documents, hence the fact that no one mentioned SSRF (yet ;)).
