I built a PDF API because every team I know has a haunted corner of their codebase they never want to open

I kept seeing the same thing across every engineering team I talked to

Not a monolith. Not tech debt in the classic sense. Something more specific: a PDF service that nobody wrote on purpose.

It started as a one-off. Someone needed invoices. They found a library, wired it up, shipped it. It worked. They moved on. Six months later the fonts are wrong on Windows. A year later it breaks under load. Two years later the person who built it is gone and nobody knows how it works.

Every team has one. The PDF corner. The thing that runs fine until it doesn't, and when it doesn't, it is always a Friday.

I built PDFPipe to be the other option.

What it is

One API endpoint. POST your HTML, get a PDF back. Under 3 seconds, pixel perfect, sandboxed. That is it.

curl -X POST https://api.pdfpipe.xyz/v1/pdf \
-H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_KEY" \
-H "Content-Type: application/json" \
-d '{"html": "<h1>Hello</h1>"}' \
--output hello.pdf

No render engine to operate. No font wrangling. No queue to babysit. You send HTML, you get a PDF.

SDKs for Node and Python. An MCP server if you are building agents. An n8n node if you are doing automation. Works wherever you can make an HTTP call.

The pricing

Free tier: 500 documents a month, forever. No card. No trial. No expiry. Just a key and a limit.

Paid starts at $19/month (3,000 docs), goes up to $499/month (100,000 docs). Enterprise is custom. The free tier is genuinely usable, not a 7-day teaser.

I set it at 500/month because that is roughly 10x what most "free tier" API products give you. If you are testing something, 500 documents is enough to actually know if it works for your use case.

Where I am

Zero paying customers. I launched publicly a few weeks ago and I am at the stage where the product works but nobody knows it exists.

The API is live. The free tier has signups. I have not converted any of them yet.

I am writing this partly because Indie Hackers is where I would want to find something like this if I were on the other side, and partly because I think the honest version of a launch post is more useful than the one where someone skips from "I had an idea" to "here are my MRR graphs."

Right now I am doing cold outreach to SaaS products that generate PDFs as part of their core workflow. HR platforms. Field service tools. EdTech. Legal tech. Every one of these teams has the same problem and most of them are running something they built once and never want to touch again.

I do not know yet if this works. I will post an update when I have something real to report.