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Comment by Brajeshwar | Hacker News Reader

May be this is just me but this looks extremely costly to me! It will cost $2,500 to generate 50,000 PDFs. Are edits/corrections additional cost?

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It sounds like this is as advanced as DocRaptor[1]. They have what I consider to be the best PDF generation API, giving complete control over the documents you need to create. The pricing is similar.

If you'd rather do it for free weasyprint[2] is the best open source alternative.

Another more affordable option you might want to consider is Urlbox[3]. (Disclosure: I work on this)

Urlbox's rendering engine is based on Chrome. It's been refined over the last 11 years to render pages as images or PDFs[4] that look great. I was a customer for 5 years before I joined the team. Everything we'd tried before Urlbox was a disappointment.

Urlbox probably can't match the power of either Onedoc or DocRaptor, but pricing starts at less than $0.01 per document and drops significantly with scale. If your PDF looks great when saving as PDF in Chrome it should look identically brilliant with Urlbox.

[1]: https://docraptor.com [2]: https://weasyprint.org [3]: https://urlbox.com [4]: https://urlbox.com/html-to-pdf

This is a good point, and we are still trying to figure out how to price things fairly. Depending on the type of PDF, whether it is a simple receipt or a large multi-pages report, associated costs are very different on our side. At this time, we rely on other proprietary software that we are aiming to replace but that incur high costs on our side as well.

Edits and corrections on generated PDFs is not provided as the PDFs are signed as-is, however you can attach the metadata to the PDF and rerender with the modifications.

Edits would be limited to certain pages but may spill over (e.g. tables) so the whole PDF need not be generated. Only edited pages can be inserted back to previously generated PDFs. Could be an optimization to reduce cost.

As a point of reference on pricing, convertAPI charges $0.05 per document conversion at their most expensive tier, and with any level of fixed commitment ($80 - $300 per month) it goes down to $0.016-0.006 per document.

Their PDF conversion is pretty good (I use it for PPT/Word -> PDF conversion), though your product is obviously different and has different/better capabilities for programmatic PDF creation. Still, a reference point.

Pricing page: https://www.convertapi.com/prices

I second this. Maybe I'm missing something in the value proposition, but we already generate PDFs from .docx/.html templates using open source libraries and Docker microservices.

Do not misunderstand. A Stripe for generating PDFs can be great, but for a small team, $0.50/PDF is way more than I can afford (after all, you can create a small number of PDFs without too much fuss). Maybe you are oriented towards large companies?

Indeed, and as you mentioned, open-source libraries are always an option. It's worth noting that our open-source library assists in document design, allowing freedom in renderer choice. While the open-source library is aimed at individuals, our API targets businesses of any size. Our pricing can be as low as $0.05 per PDF for high-volume or annual commitments. Additionally, we offer cloud hosting for your documents for up to 90 days, and our pricing includes analytics.

> $0.50/PDF is way more than I can afford

But isn't that 100x what they're actually charging--at least for an enterprise account? Their pricing page says "from $0.005/doc." (Though I'm not sure how much work "from" is doing there.) Pro tier is, admittedly, more like $0.12 per document (assuming you use your full quota). But still much less than $0.50/

I'm generally very confused by the various assertions in this thread about their pricing. What am I missing?

We use https://www.api2pdf.com/pricing/ and it's priced per bandwidth and usage - ($.001 per mb bandwidth and $0.00019551 per second of computation)

You can choose which API to use: Headless Chrome, Wkhtmltopdf, Libreoffice, etc.

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