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Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

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Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#61

Post by robocop2018 »

patrickaljord wrote: post #46
williamstein wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evidently I should clarify that by "open source", I mean "released under an OSI approved license" ( https://opensource.org/licenses ). Maybe robocop2018 means "open source" in the sense of "there is possibly minified non-human readable source code that you can look at under a very restrictive non-OSI license"?

PDF.js Express is not open source.

It is available under dual AGPL/commercial license so indeed it's open source by any definition. We'll clarify this on the site. Thanks for feedback

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#62

Post by ipsum2 »

niknikson wrote: post #42
transitivebs wrote: post #5

I'm all about the open core business model.. but are you guys affiliated with the core pdf.js team? $440 / month is pretty hard to swallow. I love that you guys included a build vs buy section, but I think it's going to be difficult to land clients at this price point because higher end clients are more likely to choose the build vs buy option. Anyhow, the product itself looks well structured. Congrats & best of luck…

Thanks for the feedback! We are not part of the core pdf.js team. In regards to pricing we found that for some companies creating their own viewer requires a fair amount of upfront resources - after trying to create their own viewers they realized the time to build and maintain was not economical. The other big consideration is the opportunity cost of sinking developer resources into a viewer that is not a core diffe…

It's super misleading to call yourself "PDF.js Express" then. It sounds like a paid extension to PDF.js. You should rename the product.

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#63

Post by lxe »

IvanK_net wrote: post #44

I spent about three years building the support for PDF into my graphics editor https://www.Photopea.com . While other editors "add stuff on top of PDF", Photopea "chews through" each byte of a PDF, and tries to make as much sense of it as possible. You can rewrite the existing text (with the same formatting), edit bézier curves, edit gradient fills. You can edit bitmaps on a pixel level. You can see the parameters as…

Photopea is a masterpiece. Thank you for building this thing.

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#64

Post by drannex »

ipsum2 wrote: post #62
niknikson wrote: post #42

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Thanks for the feedback! We are not part of the core pdf.js team. In regards to pricing we found that for some companies creating their own viewer requires a fair amount of upfront resources - after trying to create their own viewers they realized the time to build and maintain was not economical. The other big consideration is the opportunity cost of sinking developer resources into a viewer that is not a core diffe…

It's super misleading to call yourself "PDF.js Express" then. It sounds like a paid extension to PDF.js. You should rename the product.

Right there with you. This is straight up infringement and confusing for everyone involved. This should not be allowed in the slightest. Highly disingenuous for them to do this.

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#65

Post by 2pointsomone »

niknikson wrote: post #41
2pointsomone wrote: post #16

I have a startup and we are highly reliant on PDF rendering in our application. But here's the thing, Nik: your pricing model doesn't make sense to me. In general, most PDF SDK models don't make sense. I have searched a lot over the years, and am left consistently disappointed. You charge the same amount to large commercial customers as you do to small startups, who are trying to save every penny. Even though I reall…

The biggest challenge to pricing based on volume is the exercise of tracking usage. In a typical SAAS product determining usages is fairly linear. For PDF.js Express because you would be deploying from your environment we would not have an accurate way to measure usage. Fundamentally I agree with you - you should pay for what you use. Unfortunately at this time we are not able to implement that effectively. Also keep…

Good point. What if you have two models:

- One: the model you have right now. this is for organizations where the value outweighs the price tag.

- Two: Smaller organizations are generally also more willing to compromise on JS/asset bundling and performance. Why don't you give them: - a hosted JS solution where they just have to include a tag - An uglified script. I'd argue most JS developers can't unscramble these - you keep counters on number of requests - you disqualify (using some basic hashing method) run-ability of PDFJS Express based on the time the script was requested OR if an acknowledgement from a server fails. So say, if someone is using a cached version, the script will either not run at a certain point OR all the documents will be watermarked with "TRIAL".

This second way could also be the best way for getting people started immediately. Include a tag, see a watermark, but you are ready to go.

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#67

Post by martinald »

Some feedback.

Website design is poor. You could definitely do with a designer to make it look nicer.

$5000ish a year is a weird price point. It's too expensive for a hobbyist or small dev shop, but too cheap for an enterprise to buy (when you consider the time of working on procurement problems you'll experience).

You either need to make it cheap, like $200/yr, or much more expensive. Right now you are in no mans land.

You also have a * next to limited support on pricing page, but I can't see what that explains.

Offering no refunds is strange and your copy comes off passive aggressive about this. Why? As a new service I'd be all about offering full refunds with no questions asked. Most people don't ask for refunds, and you can learn very important information when they ask for one.

Terms page is very short and doesn't have a lot of terms I'd expect for a product charging $5k/yr.

Don't worry about it not being open source; that's fine.

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#68

Post by akdarrah »

eob wrote: post #36
akdarrah wrote: post #13

Hi Nick, Your product looks pretty awesome. It's super polished for your initial launch! Congrats! I'm curious how long it took to build the product and how large your team is? Do you have some initial customers? I'm building a similar paid Javascript Library business ( https://www.dropkiq.com/ ). I would love to connect if you want to share some ideas? Feel free to shoot me an email if you're interested: adam@dropki…

Just wanted to say that both Dropkiq and website to market it look fantastic. Really nice work. If you're ever interested in licensing a version to work with custom grammars (not liquid), I'd be interested! (email: ted AT instabase.com)

Thanks, Ted! I appreciate the kind words.

I'll keep your email handy if we're able to help down the road with non-liquid grammars.

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#69

Post by detaro »

niknikson wrote: post #43
williamstein wrote: post #21

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Evidently I should clarify that by "open source", I mean "released under an OSI approved license" ( https://opensource.org/licenses ). Maybe robocop2018 means "open source" in the sense of "there is possibly minified non-human readable source code that you can look at under a very restrictive non-OSI license"?

Thank you for your feedback and question. My apologies if it’s unclear. The source code for the UI is available on GitHub [1], but is minified in the download package for efficiency. Note that even though the code is "open source" in that repo, we still have a custom license [2]. [1] https://github.com/PDFTron/webviewer-ui [2] https://github.com/PDFTron/webviewer-ui/blob/6.2/LICENSE

So which is it? robocop2018 is claiming it's AGPL/commercial dual-licensed, but you say it just has the custom license and that's the only license in the repo?

Re: Show HN: Pdf.js Express – PDF annotation, e-signatures, and form filling

#70

Post by phonon »

robocop2018 wrote: post #61
patrickaljord wrote: post #46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

PDF.js Express is not open source.

It is available under dual AGPL/commercial license so indeed it's open source by any definition. We'll clarify this on the site. Thanks for feedback

https://github.com/PDFTron/webviewer-ui/search?q=agpl&unscop... ?
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