Pricing

When PdfCrowd will leave the beta status it will enter in commercial mode.
Before basing any entreprise service on it i'm quite interested in the pricing model.

PdfCrowd can become a performer in the report generation combined with google chart.

Thank you Guys.

We are in an early beta and the price has not been decided yet. But definitely, we would like to offer a fair price that is affordable. At this moment, our idea of the pricing model looks like this:

- A free plan providing a few dozens of PDFs a month.
- A paid plan providing 1000 PDFs a month.
- If your volume is above that of the paid plan you will be able to buy additional conversion tokens.

Please, anyone feel free to comment on this.

That should be a good plan for me :

pdf / month

25 free
250 8?
500 15?
1000 25?

My price are based on the CPU price on the cloud and some good sense :)
For this price i feel i will join the Pack 500 for the rest of my time in my compagny :D

Do we as beta testers get the software for free (unlimited pdf conversions) when it's out of beta? Or can we purchase the tool outright?

I ask because my project is wrapping up with this client and I will need to purchase some tool that does this as a 1 time purchase.. not based on pdf generations.. Something like ExpertHTMLtoPDF. Only problem with them is security on shared web hosts.

Once we are out of beta, we will give all our beta users a free month during which they can evaluate our pricing and potentially subscribe to our paid services.

So you can continue using our service for free until it goes out of beta, then check our pricing and if you need something else just contact us. We are open to listen our users' individual needs.

For tsikes situation, It would make sense that PDF Crowd has a limited free plan (25-100 a month?).

As for my self - I am currently using a VPS for this, but I am seriously looking into outsourcing the process. However, it can only get price effective for me, If PDFCrowd can offer a a cheaper solution ($10 or less) for about 10k conversions.

Currently I am paying around $60 for a server, with a capacity of about 500 pdf/h, but Its hardly the pattern I'm using. Solidos cloud solution could save a lot of money, for my burst periods, where I have to create about 100 pdfs in a very short time. But that adds to the complexity of our product. Solutions for this problem is either a scalable PDFCrowd standalone application (that works in nix systems) or a cost effective external service (PDFCrowd.com).

The current suggestion of 1000pdfs per $25 is way over the top for a larger website owners. Once again - Extra Large EC2 costs $1 per hour, and I am pretty sure I can generate 1000pdfs in that period easily.

Essentially this post is about:
1. Make sure the service scales - it works under sudden high loads
2. Make sure pricing is attractive for developers. (Users with Desktop PCs can get Bullzip or any similar software to convert PDFs for free, so I doubt that they are going to be your audience)

Ro Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> For tsikes situation, It would make sense that PDF
> Crowd has a limited free plan (25-100 a month?).
>
> As for my self - I am currently using a VPS for
> this, but I am seriously looking into outsourcing
> the process. However, it can only get price
> effective for me, If PDFCrowd can offer a a
> cheaper solution ($10 or less) for about 10k
> conversions.
>
> Currently I am paying around $60 for a server,
> with a capacity of about 500 pdf/h, but Its hardly
> the pattern I'm using. Solidos cloud solution
> could save a lot of money, for my burst periods,
> where I have to create about 100 pdfs in a very
> short time. But that adds to the complexity of our
> product. Solutions for this problem is either a
> scalable PDFCrowd standalone application (that
> works in nix systems) or a cost effective external
> service (PDFCrowd.com).
>
> The current suggestion of 1000pdfs per $25 is way
> over the top for a larger website owners. Once
> again - Extra Large EC2 costs $1 per hour, and I
> am pretty sure I can generate 1000pdfs in that
> period easily.
>
> Essentially this post is about:
> 1. Make sure the service scales - it works under
> sudden high loads
> 2. Make sure pricing is attractive for developers.
> (Users with Desktop PCs can get Bullzip or any
> similar software to convert PDFs for free, so I
> doubt that they are going to be your audience)

Points taken, thanks for your comment.

Are you selling a standalone application for this or the library which we can use with PHP?
There are several free HTML to PDF converter libraries but it has so many restrictions. I tried PDFCrowd and you got it very right as to whatever form the HTML is. It is essential because the HTML is provided/inputted by a user in the application I am developing.

Would greatly appreciate your response.

Thanks.

josh Wrote:
-------------------------------------------------------
> Are you selling a standalone application for this
> or the library which we can use with PHP?
> There are several free HTML to PDF converter
> libraries but it has so many restrictions. I
> tried PDFCrowd and you got it very right as to
> whatever form the HTML is. It is essential
> because the HTML is provided/inputted by a user in
> the application I am developing.

Josh, we do not sell a standalone library, sorry.

The online API is not an option for you?