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Why We Built reportgen.io (and What Everyone Else Got Wrong)

May 6, 2025

PDF generation should be simple.

You send HTML. You get a PDF.

Fast. Cheap. Predictable. That’s what we wanted. That’s what we built.

What Everyone Else Got Wrong

Most PDF tools are bloated platforms pretending to be essential infrastructure.

They want you to:

  • Sign up for a subscription,
  • Learn their templating system,
  • Pray your documents don’t silently fail in prod.

We didn’t want a platform.

We wanted a utility.

Like curl for PDFs. Send HTML. Get output. Move on.

Instead, we hit:

  • File size limits we didn’t know existed
  • Silent failures with zero logs
  • Subscription walls for basic functionality

And one day, 3,000 customer invoices quietly failed because our vendor capped PDFs at 5MB.

We didn’t get a warning.

We got a fire drill.

So we built our own.

What We Got Right (Yes, We’re Saying It Early)

🔧 Built for Developers, by Developers

  • HTML → PDF via curl, fetch, or your favorite language.
  • Templating engines? Use EJS, Handlebars, GoTempl, or raw HTML.
  • Sync or async - your call.

🚀 Built to Scale (Really)

  • Largest single PDF generated so far: 189MB
  • 99.999% delivery success across 300,000+ PDFs
  • Unlimited file size, no concurrency limits, no surprise ceilings

💵 Pricing That Doesn’t Punish You

  • 150 PDFs/month free
  • After that? $0.0025 per PDF
  • No credit card required, no monthly fee, no hidden crap

This Isn’t Just for Hackers

This is running in production for:

  • SaaS companies sending 5,000+ invoices a month
  • Internal ops teams automating quarterly reports
  • Data platforms like Datapulse turning analytics dashboards into slick, branded PDFs

If your HTML renders in a browser, it renders with us.

This Was Never Meant To Be a Business

It started as an internal tool. Something to make PDFs not suck.

But then other devs saw it. Asked for it. Plugged it into their stack. And said, “This should be public.”

Now it is.

But it’s still the same thing:

  • No fluff
  • No lock-in
  • Just clean, fast, reliable output

If You’ve Been Burned Too…

Try reportgen.io.

No strings. No surprises. Just a tool that works when you need it to.

We built this because we were burned. If you’ve been burned too - or just want PDFs that don’t suck - get your free API key. No fluff. Just output.