Show HN: ThePDFApi, a Chrome Based PDF Generation API Hosted on AWS

#1

Post by marcTPA » Tue, May 29, 2018, 5:21 PM UTC

Hello HN!

It kept surprising me how much of a hassle it is to generate a PDF with decent HTML5 rendering from my SaaS apps. I tried several free libs and APIs but ended up with botched rendering a lot of times. So I set out to simplify this chore by creating an AWS hosted HTML to PDF conversion API that's based on Chrome. This API will allow a dev to just send the HTML to our API and get a PDF in response without having to worry about running and managing Chrome somewhere in their infra.

I just finished the first version of my landing page and hosted pdf generation API (https://thePdfApi.com) and would love to have some feedback on the following points:

- is it clear upon viewing the landing page what the product is about?

- are there any questions that you have that are not answered on the page? I'm thinking about adding an FAQ once the first questions pop up.

- would this product provide value to you if your startup needed to generate PDFs? If not, what would you use instead?

Thanks for helping a fellow hacker out.

https://thePdfApi.com

Re: Show HN: ThePDFApi, a Chrome Based PDF Generation API Hosted on AWS

#2

Post by richjdsmith » Tue, May 29, 2018, 6:55 PM UTC

Looks good! Pricing is a bit steeper than I'd expected, but I've also never tried dealing with the pains of trying to generate PDFs. What stack is it built on?

Re: Show HN: ThePDFApi, a Chrome Based PDF Generation API Hosted on AWS

#3

Post by swyx » Tue, May 29, 2018, 6:56 PM UTC

yes, it looks very nice. i dont have a need to generate pdf's unfortunately so i'm not your target market. good luck. great to productize your side effects.

Re: Show HN: ThePDFApi, a Chrome Based PDF Generation API Hosted on AWS

#4

Post by marcTPA » Tue, May 29, 2018, 7:00 PM UTC

A little addendum, I'm also contemplating to create a manual service where you could send me a document in any format (JPG, PSD, Microsoft Word) and I'd create a REST endpoint that you can call with the data that you want to have inserted into the document. The output of this rest endpoint would be the binary PDF data.

This way your dev team would not have to invest any time at all in the creation of PDF documents. Shoot me a mail at the email address in my profile if you want to know more.

Re: Show HN: ThePDFApi, a Chrome Based PDF Generation API Hosted on AWS

#5

Post by marcTPA » Tue, May 29, 2018, 7:01 PM UTC

swyx wrote: post #3

yes, it looks very nice. i dont have a need to generate pdf's unfortunately so i'm not your target market. good luck. great to productize your side effects.

Thanks for the kind words!

Re: Show HN: ThePDFApi, a Chrome Based PDF Generation API Hosted on AWS

#6

Post by ertand » Tue, May 29, 2018, 7:02 PM UTC

I don't know much about the complexities of this task so excuse my question if it's too obvious.

How is it different/better than using puppeteer? If it's better, maybe SxS comparisons of generated pdfs could be a good selling point.

Re: Show HN: ThePDFApi, a Chrome Based PDF Generation API Hosted on AWS

#7

Post by starptech » Tue, May 29, 2018, 7:03 PM UTC

Generating PDF's from HTML and Web Technologies is nothing new. There are tons of PHP and Node.js libs e.g I could host a service in minutes with the help of https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer in only few lines of code. Hosting that service on digital-ocean would reduce the cost to ~5/month. Cheers!

Re: Show HN: ThePDFApi, a Chrome Based PDF Generation API Hosted on AWS

#8

Post by marcTPA » Tue, May 29, 2018, 7:05 PM UTC

richjdsmith wrote: post #2

Looks good! Pricing is a bit steeper than I'd expected, but I've also never tried dealing with the pains of trying to generate PDFs. What stack is it built on?

Thank you. Pricing is still experimental, I'm hoping that the easy API interface and the lack of maintenance that my clients would need to do provide a lot more value than the monthly cost.

The stack is Linux on Docker, running a tweaked version of headless Chrome with an API created in Node.

Re: Show HN: ThePDFApi, a Chrome Based PDF Generation API Hosted on AWS

#9

Post by smhg » Tue, May 29, 2018, 7:06 PM UTC

Simple layout and fast loading time: big plus. I think the copy could be better. Put more focus on the strengths. Don't use the link-blue color if it isn't a link.

About the PDF results: I get mobile versions of websites a lot, but I guess in normal use cases you won't even request those.

Re: Show HN: ThePDFApi, a Chrome Based PDF Generation API Hosted on AWS

#10

Post by marcTPA » Tue, May 29, 2018, 7:12 PM UTC

starptech wrote: post #7

Generating PDF's from HTML and Web Technologies is nothing new. There are tons of PHP and Node.js libs e.g I could host a service in minutes with the help of https://github.com/GoogleChrome/puppeteer in only few lines of code. Hosting that service on digital-ocean would reduce the cost to ~5/month. Cheers!

Thanks for your feedback.

You are right that generating PDFs from HTML and Web Technologies is nothing new. Most existing PHP and node libs sadly don't provide great rendering once you have a document that consists of modern CSS and HTML or modern image formats such as SVG.

Puppeteer would indeed provide the same rendering quality but then you're responsible for the maintenance of the running instances. I'm hoping to make my user's life easier by taking this task out of their hands.