dawg why can't you just make a normal program I don't want a REST API
Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
31–40 of 125 posts
Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#32Very useful product, congratulations. ;-) Quite expensive though. When I use an API, I usually assume (1) there will be some significant base volume, and (2) this volume has no upper bound, depending on my users behavior. For ~750 € you can only process 1k documents during the month... hard-capped? The price schemes seem to target entreprise but entreprises usually have bigger volumes than that. (But maybe I confuse…
Wow so if I’m reading this they charge about $1 USD per “document”? I’ve been looking for an easy OCR solution considering I have about 10,000 one-page documents a month (invoices). For comparison, Amazon textract is ~$0.05/pg for key-value pairs, but it involves more programming to set up.
If you're looking for something that's robust and easy to setup but a bit more expensive than Textract, check out https://www.impira.com/ (Disclaimer: I am the founder/CEO there).
Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#33Very useful product, congratulations. ;-) Quite expensive though. When I use an API, I usually assume (1) there will be some significant base volume, and (2) this volume has no upper bound, depending on my users behavior. For ~750 € you can only process 1k documents during the month... hard-capped? The price schemes seem to target entreprise but entreprises usually have bigger volumes than that. (But maybe I confuse…
Thanks! This is Claudio, PSPDFKit's CTO. At this point in time the price is per generated document - irrespectively of how complicated the operation is. Because you can combine operations in one http call, you're incentivised to do that as opposed to perform separate calls which increase the possibility of errors and cost for all sides. Happily taking feedback though - your comment around hard-cap is definitely sound…
> At this point in time the price is per generated document - irrespectively of how complicated the operation is.
As part of an integration for a few customers we do relatively simple PDF operations. Combining a few TIFFs into a PDF, or splitting a PDF into separate PDF per page for example. Think invoices vs orders. Can be a royal PITA though due to edge cases in terms of whatever generated the TIFFs or PDFs.
However each of our customers have 1-10k documents per day, and we're in Scandinavia so small fries in terms of volume.
edit: OCR and table extraction is something that might be very interesting depending on quality, but again even 10k/mo seems low for most of our larger customers.
Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#34A few years ago, $COMPANY had similar needs for a client. I ended up creating an in-house solution, which has a surprisingly close API (well, there are only so many ways to do this).
So I asked myself: if this kit existed at the time, would we have used it? I don't think so. For all specified pricing plans, the document limit is way too low for what $COMPANY or its clients do. Judging by the progression of the costs, we'd have gone in-house instead of negotiating an Enterprise plan.
If you don't want to adjust pricing, perhaps you could add a consumption based plan. The plan could have a much larger limit, but the client also pays per API call.
Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#35I recently discovered that search-replacing text in a PDF without changing the layout is much harder than I thought it would be (a customer forgot to change their billing address, and now that the invoice is finalized, Stripe won't let me edit anything, so down the PDF-editing rabbithole I went). I would love it if I could just use an API for this.
If it's just one off, I'd draw a white rectangle over the text that needs to be changed, then add the text on top of that.
Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#36Hi Arek...congrats on the launch.
Maybe PSPDFKit is interested in integrating Bionic Reading into their products? Take a look at the website (bionic-reading.com) to see if BR can add value to your users.
Let me know if you are interested and best regards from the Swiss Alps, Renato
Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#37How have you avoided the AGPL headache that comes with almost all the open source libraries for PDF editing? Have you written your own code from scratch?
Our engine is based on Google's PDFium, which is Apache licensed. We use it for rendering and reading the PDF object tree. Editing, annotations, etc. are all built on top of that.
Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#38Taking a quick look at https://pspdfkit.com/api/documentation/tools-and-api/, I'm puzzled.... what distinguishes a "PDF Generator" from a "PDF Creator" from a "PDF Writer"? How would I know which one I want?
Oh, looks like they're the exact same thing: a webpage-to-PDF service.
Then there are a whole bunch of "PDF Converter" options, including "HTML > PDF", which seems to be yet another name for the same thing.
For me, all this has a whiff of SEO spam that I find quite distasteful. Just tell me what the product does. Don't try to list it under a collection of different titles in the hope of catching more search terms, it just makes you sound like a snake-oil salesman.
Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#39Not a good usecase for an online API. To the extent that those PDFs could include sensitive information, there's a huge security/privacy headache there, with no real benefit when compared to performing these functions offline. It also seems to me a lot more expensive than alternative ways of doing the same thing.
Vast majority of organisations already store all their working documents and data in the cloud.
Re: Show HN: PDF API – Generate, convert, and modify PDF documents
#40A few years ago, $COMPANY had similar needs for a client. I ended up creating an in-house solution, which has a surprisingly close API (well, there are only so many ways to do this). So I asked myself: if this kit existed at the time, would we have used it? I don't think so. For all specified pricing plans, the document limit is way too low for what $COMPANY or its clients do. Judging by the progression of the costs,…
Thanks for the feedback! For those that need larger volume, we also have an on-premise product: https://pspdfkit.com/api/documentation/deployment-options/.