Three days debugging Puppeteer for an invoicing feature, memory leaks, blank pages in production, fonts not loading, I ended up shipping something that broke every few weeks. So I built a proper API instead.
The core is a dual-engine system: a native renderer for simple documents (under 100ms), and headless and cached Chromium for complex CSS layouts.
The API picks automatically based on what you send.
Other things I added:
1. Tailwind CSS built-in (no build step).
2. Markdown → PDF
3. Async job queue for batch generation, webhooks, and a visual template designer for the no-code path.
Free tier is 50 PDFs/month, no credit card. Paid starts at $9.
https://lightningpdf.dev
What would actually make you switch from your current setup?
mircerlancerous•1h ago
You may want to offer a page credits option instead, as "50 pdfs" for the free tier is a little vague. Is that 50 1-page pdfs, or 50 100 page pdfs? We generate our pdfs one page at a time, and then stitch them together into one at the end; I'm unsure whether your solution would be practical for us. Self-hosting is maybe the other option
DigitalTrubador•1h ago
The core is a dual-engine system: a native renderer for simple documents (under 100ms), and headless and cached Chromium for complex CSS layouts.
The API picks automatically based on what you send.
Other things I added: 1. Tailwind CSS built-in (no build step). 2. Markdown → PDF 3. Async job queue for batch generation, webhooks, and a visual template designer for the no-code path.
Free tier is 50 PDFs/month, no credit card. Paid starts at $9. https://lightningpdf.dev What would actually make you switch from your current setup?