Hi everyone! Really excited to be here today!
I’ve been building stuff for the web and when I started charging for it, I found out that generating an invoice in PDF was a pain in the … well, it was not that easy.
I used to work with libraries but they were always missing a few things and took some server resources that could have been better used to serve my visitors.
That’s why I came up with the idea of PDFSHift. I know I’m not the first - and certainly not the last - but after looking at the alternatives online, I thought that the current offer was out of date and a new, more up-to-date, services, could be useful.
I focus a lot of efforts on offering a great customer service, ready to help anyone to make their PDF awesome and I already received a few great feedbacks from my users :)
I’m here all day to answer all your comments and question, and happy to chat!
@cx42net Hi Cyril,
PDFShift looks nice. We're considering moving away from our home-grown solution (which uses the Flying Saucer XHTML renderer in conjunction with a PDF back end: https://github.com/flyingsaucerp...).
However, Google introduced headless Chrome support in Cloud Functions and App Engine less than a month ago (https://cloud.google.com/blog/pr...). How does Google's offering compare to PDFShift in terms of pricing, availability, customizability and rendering fidelity? (If you're also using Chrome or Chromium, rendering should be identical.)
@davidpolberger Hi David, that's an awesome question!
I was working on PDFShift when I saw the release and was a bit stressed when I learned about it.
But I tested it, and I understood we aren't in the same market: Google AppEngine is a IaaS and as such, it's much harder to setup a system to convert HTML to PDF using their tool. It's not the direct aim, and it will require a bit of work.
With PDFShift, you just have to make POST call to make it work, so there's less work involved :)
Also, after testing it, I realized it's awfully slow, at least for now (I hope they'll improve it. If it becomes really efficient, I might switch the backend to their). It took 20s to convert the front page of ProductHunt :/
@vahagn_mkrtchyan Almost none ;) Truth is, we use a modified version of Puppeteer in the backend, with advanced features and some twists.
But the big advantage compared to Puppeteer is the fact that the hardware resource needed to convert is outsourced, leaving your computer with free resource to handle more request or serve them faster.
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