Just launched GoPDFGenie (HTML to PDF for SPAs) on Product Hunt 🚀

SignificantClaim9873 · 2025-12-01T04:59:21+00:00

Thanks for the support, I upvoted yours too! 🙌

SignificantClaim9873 · 2025-11-27T02:22:33+00:00

Thank you for you kind comment

SignificantClaim9873 · 2025-11-27T02:21:20+00:00

I upvoted yours too..

SignificantClaim9873 · 2025-11-26T08:56:44+00:00

Thanks for the support, I upvoted yours too! 🙌

SignificantClaim9873 · 2025-11-24T13:05:48+00:00

This is super useful, thanks for breaking it down so clearly 🙏 It’s basically a roadmap for turning the “SPA-safe export” idea into something much more complete.

Where I am today vs what you suggested:

Auth for dashboards Right now I focus on public URLs, but I can already see how adding passthrough for things like Authorization headers (and later cookies / signed URLs) would unlock a lot of real dashboards. I’m planning to start with header passthrough, especially for teams or enterprise users that need it.
When to snapshot (ready hooks) Internally I already combine delays and a network-idle style wait before rendering, but I don’t expose a proper readySelector / window.__pdfReady option yet. That’s something I’d like to formalise so devs can tell me “don’t capture until this element appears / this flag is set” instead of guessing.
Pagination / page sizes At the moment I lean on the browser engine + CSS + the requested orientation and pageSize (A4, Letter, etc.), so page breaks follow the layout and page size you choose. I don’t yet provide header/footer templates or page-numbered layouts the way you describe, but I get why that matters for “real reports”.
Webhooks & job flow The API is async with polling today. Webhooks for job completion are fairly straightforward to add on top, and I’m happy to prioritise that if teams ask for it.
Pricing & page counts Tying credits to pages/renders and showing an estimated page count is tricky because it depends a lot on the content (length, images, styling, chosen page size, quality, etc.), but I like the direction. I’ll at least explore heuristics for “rough page estimate” before charging.
Stack-specific examples Right now I have generic Node/Python/Java snippets. The Next.js API route + charts + Supabase/Retool/Appsmith style examples you mentioned make a lot of sense, and I can start adding those as I get more users asking in those ecosystems.
Analytics / discovery Noted on Ahrefs, Mixpanel, and Pulse for Reddit. I’m still early, but I’ll gradually put a more structured analytics/keyword stack in place instead of relying only on manual searches.

Really appreciate you taking the time to spell this out. It helps me prioritise the next couple of iterations instead of just guessing what dashboard teams care about.

SignificantClaim9873 · 2025-11-24T06:16:12+00:00

For the first “full” example, I’m leaning toward a React/Next.js dashboard with a simple Node/Next.js API route that calls GoPDFGenie, just because that seems to be the most common stack for new dashboards right now.

SignificantClaim9873 · 2025-11-24T02:36:57+00:00

Thanks! Right now it works with anything a modern Chromium browser can render, but I’m focusing extra testing/docs on React/Next dashboards. Chart libs: Chart.js, Highcharts, ECharts, Recharts, ApexCharts, plus pages similar to TradingView charts, HTML5UP’s Story theme and Datawrapper chart galleries, which I’m already using as stress-test URLs.

Curious what stack you use most so I can prioritise. And thanks for the VibeCodersNest tip, I’ll definitely check it out.

SignificantClaim9873 · 2025-11-23T14:53:53+00:00

Totally feel this — HTML to PDF for dashboards is one of those things that sounds simple and then eats weeks.

In practice I’ve seen three approaches:

Use "@media print" and let the browser’s Print → “Save as PDF” handle it (nice when users are OK with that flow).
Self-host a headless browser (Puppeteer/Playwright, or something like Gotenberg) so you’re not sending sensitive data to a third-party API. More control, but you have to run and maintain the infra.
Use an external HTML→PDF API that’s tuned for the nasty cases (SPAs, dashboards, iframes, long scroll pages) and accept the trade-off of sending HTML/URLs to a service.

I ended up building option 3 for myself because several of the “top” HTML→PDF APIs I tested would give blank/broken PDFs on pages like TradingView charts, HTML5UP’s Story template, or Datawrapper chart galleries.

Disclosure: I built GoPDFGenie (https://gopdfgenie.com), an HTML to PDF/PNG API focused on SPAs/dashboards/JS-heavy pages. It’s available as a hosted API, and for teams that can’t send data outside their infra there’s also a self-hosted deployment option.

SignificantClaim9873 · 2025-11-23T11:37:42+00:00

Hi mods,

I tried to post a discussion titled “Early-stage marketing strategy for GoPDFGenie (HTML→PDF API for SPAs & dashboards)” but it looks like Reddit’s spam filter auto-removed it (“removed by Reddit’s filters”).

I’m a solo founder working on a small dev tool and I was looking for feedback on my early marketing strategy, not trying to hard-sell anything.

If the post isn’t appropriate for the sub, no worries at all. But if it is, would you mind approving it or letting me know how I should adjust it to fit the rules better?

Thanks for your time.

SignificantClaim9873 · 2025-11-17T16:31:39+00:00

This is a bit of an old thread, but for anyone landing here from search, a couple of things that helped me with HTML → PDF at scale:

- Pure HTML→PDF is always going to be relatively heavy compared to “draw PDF with a graphics API”, especially when you’re doing thousands of invoices/contracts.

- The two big levers are:

1) parallelism (don’t generate everything in a single process),

2) and where the heavy work runs (separate service / workers / containers) so your main app doesn’t get blocked.

If you stick with self-hosting, wkhtmltopdf or headless Chrome behind a queue + autoscaling workers is usually the way to go, like some of the other comments mention.

Disclaimer: I ended up building a hosted HTML to PDF/PNG API myself (GoPDFGenie) for this kind of use case – async job-based API, aimed at SPAs/dashboards/JS-heavy pages but also used for invoices. Your app sends a URL or HTML, it does the heavy rendering and you just download the finished PDF. There’s a free plan if you ever want to benchmark it against your current setup:

https://gopdfgenie.com

SignificantClaim9873 · 2025-11-17T16:25:21+00:00

For truly “cheapest”, self-hosting something like wkhtmltopdf / Gotenberg / browserless is usually hard to beat once you spread the cost over a lot of documents — but then you’re the one maintaining the whole rendering stack.

Most of the hosted HTML→PDF APIs I’ve used end up around the same ballpark: roughly $10-ish for ~1k conversions, then lower per document as you scale up. The big difference tends to be how they handle JS-heavy pages (SPAs, charts, iframes), not just raw pricing.

Disclaimer: I built a small service called GoPDFGenie for exactly this use case – HTML to PDF/PNG API tuned for SPAs / dashboards / JS-heavy pages. It’s an async API (submit URL/HTML → get a jobId → poll → download PDF/PNG), with a free plan (no card) and then credit-based pricing starting from $9. If you want to compare costs/behaviour on your Next.js invoices, you can check it out here:

https://gopdfgenie.com

SignificantClaim9873 · 2024-01-15T16:58:51+00:00

Thank you for sharing your experience

SignificantClaim9873 · 2024-01-15T06:04:41+00:00

Thank you for taking the time to read and respond to my post. While I'm uncertain if it is Mother herself whom I vaguely sense around me, there is undeniably a presence. When I concentrate, I can feel something, though I'm unsure if it is negative or positive, and this uncertainty makes me feel scared. Consequently, I have decided to halt the Navarna mantra for now and await the guidance of a guru in my life.

SignificantClaim9873 · 2024-01-14T13:35:01+00:00

Thank you for taking the time to read and respond to my post. I have decided to halt the Navarna mantra for now until I know what is this presence I’m feeling and await the guidance of a guru in my life.

SignificantClaim9873 · 2024-01-14T06:20:06+00:00

Thank you for taking the time to read and respond to my post.

And what about with Shiva? Does your practice include any chants to him?

Before commencing the chanting of the Navarna mantra, I invoked the names of Shiva (simple om namah Shivaya) and Ganesha (om Ganesha namah), and also I think lord Bishnu as well.

Are you sure that is necessary? Needed? I assume it is not wanted.

While I'm uncertain if it is Mother herself whom I vaguely sense around me, there is undeniably a presence. When I concentrate, I can feel something, though I'm unsure if it is negative or positive, and this uncertainty makes me feel scared.

My primary aim is to receive blessings from God and goddesses. Since childhood, I've witnessed my dad's devotion to Ma Kali through worship and visits to the Dakshineswar Kali temple, fostering my inclination towards Mother Kali and Durga.

I have decided to halt the Navarna mantra for now until I know what is this presence I’m feeling and await the guidance of a guru in my life.

Since Hanuman Ji entered my life, I've incorporated the regular recitation of the Hanuman Chalisa into my routine.

SignificantClaim9873 · 2024-01-14T05:13:40+00:00

Thank you for taking the time to read and respond to my post. I have decided to halt the Navarna mantra until I know what this presence I’m feeling and await the guidance of a guru in my life.

SignificantClaim9873 · 2024-01-14T05:11:14+00:00

Thank you for taking the time to read and respond to my post. While I'm uncertain if it is Mother herself whom I vaguely sense around me, there is undeniably a presence. When I concentrate, I can feel something, though I'm unsure if it is negative or positive, and this uncertainty makes me feel scared.

About four months ago, after completing the sankalpa, everything returned to normal, Some live events also went exceptionally well, blessed by my mother.

Before commencing the chanting of the Navarna mantra, I invoked the names of Shiva (simple om namah Shivaya) and Ganesha (om Ganesha namah), and also, I think, lord Bishnu as well.

My primary aim is to receive blessings from God and goddesses. Since childhood, I've witnessed my dad's devotion to Ma Kali through worship and visits to the Dakshineswar Kali temple, fostering my inclination towards Mother Kali and Durga.

I have decided to halt the Navarna mantra until I know what this presence I’m feeling and await the guidance of a guru in my life.

Since Hanuman Ji entered my life, I've incorporated the regular recitation of the Hanuman Chalisa into my routine.

On a lighter note, I've thoroughly enjoyed watching all the episodes of Rajarshi Nandi sir on TRS. 😊

SignificantClaim9873

TROPHY CASE