
Show HN: HTML to PDF cloud service - evensoul
https://htmlpdfapi.com/
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stephenr
This is the weirdest billing model I have seen.

You pre-pay for credits (which expire) and then conversions consume credits,
based on the resulting file size of the PDF.

They state quite clearly that its powered by wkhtmltopdf. The minimum spend is
for 100 credits, which costs 4 Euros. For 65cents more, you'd get a complete
low-spec VPS for the month, which can convert as many documents as you need.

Honestly, who is using these "I took a simple command line tool, made a flashy
website, and cooked up a ridiculous billing scheme" services. There was a "zip
files as a service" the other day, and there are always "image converter"
services listed.

Are people really not able to work out how to use these tools directly, but
able to use a HTTP API?

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evensoul
hi, I'm the author of this product and thanks for the comment.

Let me try to explain the logic behind it.

I think it is better to have rollover plans then fixed plans where you are
forced to buy a 1000 of X per month and if you use 800 you loose the 200 ones.

As converting of the depends on resources speed (images on slow server) it was
only fair to set price per size as it's the only unit that could be
standardized.

You could get VPS but then you have to manage it, which means you have to be
available 24/7 or pay someone for it. And if you have the need to deliver just
10 PDF documents at the same time you will need bigger VPS or more of them.
Then you will need some kind of redundancy if one of the server goes down and
one load balancer between them and some outside service to monitor it all and
you get the point. When things get bigger everything becomes more and more
complicated.

I hope I've managed to explain why we made this decisions.

