We've been using Aspose.PDF for the last 10 years or so in our C# platform, and paying for the license. It's expensive and buggy and has shite support, so a year or so back I decided to see if there was some other library or combination of libraries that could meet our needs. Basically, we needed:

* HTML to PDF

* Compress PDF

* Manual PDF generation

* Text extraction

* No browser engine or other weird dependencies

I researched every library I could find, and downloaded, integrated and tested anything that looked remotely promising.

At the end of all that, I reluctantly handed my company credit card back to Aspose. There simply wasn't any open-source or even just cheaper PDF library that I could actually make work, and all the other paid ones that did work were even more expensive.