Launch HN: Onedoc (YC W24) – A better way to create PDFs

Original Article ↗ Hacker News Discussion ↗

Pricing & Business Model

  • Many commenters find the initial pricing “expensive,” especially per-document billing for high-volume or low-margin use cases (e.g., invoices, long mortgage documents).
  • Comparisons are made to ConvertAPI, api2pdf, DocRaptor, Urlbox, htmldocs, etc., which can be significantly cheaper per document.
  • The team clarifies pricing has already been revised down (as low as ~$0.005/doc at scale) and is still evolving; per-page vs per-document confusion appears multiple times.
  • Several argue that beyond a certain scale, it’s cheaper to build in‑house; suggestions include fixed-price/on‑prem licenses pegged to a fraction of a developer’s salary.

Alternatives & Existing Ecosystem

  • Numerous alternatives mentioned: headless Chrome/Puppeteer/Playwright, PrinceXML, DocRaptor, WeasyPrint, Paged.js, Gotenberg, jsPDF/gofpdf wrappers, Typst, LaTeX/ConTeXt, Pandoc, xsl‑fo, pdf-lib, DocSpring, Platoforms, PDFlib, etc.
  • Some say the FOSS stack (Playwright + Paged.js) is “state of the art” and hard to justify paying for unless value is added around reliability, layout safeguards, or compliance.
  • Others report pain with existing tools, especially around layout, page breaks, forms, and accessibility, and are open to a better integrated solution.

Technology & Features

  • Onedoc’s API currently wraps PrinceXML/DocRaptor; the goal is to replace this with a custom engine for better control, features, and costs.
  • Uses HTML/CSS with strong support for PrintCSS/Paged Media, not a headless browser, to improve typography and layout (widows/orphans, page boxes, headers/footers, page regions).
  • React-based open-source library focuses on making PDF layout feel like typical frontend work; supports Tailwind, Chakra UI, Markdown, LaTeX, SVG.
  • Supports tagged PDFs and aims at PDF/UA‑1 accessibility based on HTML semantics; targets PDF 1.7 with ICC color profiles and various page boxes, though not all print features (e.g., ArtBox) are complete.
  • Roadmap includes form filling, programmatic signatures, richer metadata, analytics, S3 integrations, and eventually self‑hosted/on‑prem.

Performance, Security & Market Fit

  • Current render times are “seconds,” slower than tuned headless-Chrome setups; performance improvements are in progress.
  • Some highlight security (especially SSRF and PII) and insist on SOC2/ISO27001 and on‑prem for serious adoption. Work toward SOC2 and future self-hosting is acknowledged.
  • There is interest from sectors with complex, long, or regulated documents (government, legal, healthcare, finance), particularly if accessible/tagged PDFs and compliance are robust.
  • Underlying debate: PDFs are ubiquitous but unpleasant; some wish for alternatives, while others argue that building on the entrenched PDF ecosystem is the only practical path.