This isn’t just a niche issue either: this is a very real consideration for any corporate user. More companies are taking data loss and security issues seriously, which often means restricting what cloud services they are willing to use.
Despite the proliferation of cloud services, most large enterprises DO NOT want their sensitive documents entering the cloud. And in some cases, e.g. patient medical records, there are strict regulations about how those documents can be stored, which means on-premise is a requirement.
Good news for us, as that's what we specialise in, but also perplexing how trends in the software industry can completely ignore what customers actually want.
Plus our enterprise automation product can basically talk to anything via REST API ( https://www.pdf-tools.com/docs/conversion-service/api/conver... ).
But yeah - now you got me fired up to annoy some colleagues ;)
I admit PHP will not be as good of a candidate but for smaller companies it is still extremely attractive, and it's probably easier to develop since you can write PHP extension in C.
I initially read this backwards and thought you were lamenting that people insist on on-prem stuff when cloud is clearly The Right Thing.
I certainly don't think the entire software industry is ignoring what customers actually want. Case in point, you. But also lots of other developers who thrive in covering the myriad use cases the myopic behemoths can't see. They just have very loud PR and marketing and pretend those cases don't exist, so you hear about them a lot.
However, the pricing page with no actual numbers and the ambiguous ‘Contact Us’ is a huge turn off.
I cannot stand the dance with business people who want to have a bunch of calls and meetings to know how big a company they’re dealing with is before they decide on a good rate to gouge them.
Pricing pages should be straight forward. Have tiers if you want to cover your rear but only at the limit of usage have the ‘Contact Us’ option.
I’m shopping around for a PDF solution and would’ve recommended this to my manager but I’m not willing to do more meetings to get quotes.
Same. About three years ago we introduced a company wide policy to not buy anything where the price is not known. So, so much time (money) being wasted on figuring out the actual costs, the offering would have to be really inexpensive to make up for this. And if that were the case, the price would be right there.
They usually do high usage volume pricing at high rates that are proportional to the size of the company and make you sign a yearly agreement so they can get a huge payment upfront.
How about building some trust? What if the service sucks? It will be hard to get your money back and you paid a year in advance.
They make you work to get a quote and the quote usually doesn’t work for your needs.
I too will not look at services with this pricing structure anymore unless word of mouth is favorable.
It’s also one of the top-10 web usability mistakes as defined by the Nielsen Norman group.
As in, it drives away far more potential clients than it can possibly convert. It’s a massive anti-pattern.
Should security concerns really warrant not trusting the (reputable) vendor that the files are not being uploaded, you would need to do some sort of audit and/or run in an isolated environment and wouldn't be the "random user" referred to in OP.
If you also wear a tinfoil hat, delete the local storage, etc, after you are done using it.
THe site renders fine otherwise. I'm not a technical user, but i do run Ublock in the complete Javascript disabled settings.
Very true, but I'd wish this "common" knowledge is more widespread. Security is a major issue commonly overlooked. People do a lot of insecure things for convenience.
You can read more in the privacy policy [1]
It can also be embed in any website [2]
Disclosure: I’m the developer behind it
I almost thought this hn post was the same service wrapped in a show and tell.
I definitely would recommend it. It was really quick to setup; though my already having a reverse proxy with wild card TLS certs setup probably helped streamline the networking side of things.