PDF Hippo: Dynamic PDF API for Devs

Convert Excel templates into dynamic PDFs

Productivity

API

Developer Tools

Hi PH Community, I'm Balakrishna from the PDFHippo team. Super excited to launch PDFHippo with all of you today! Why did we build PDFHippo? I have been a developer for 10+ years now and one thing I always struggle with is integrating PDFs within our existing product. PDF Hippo aims to solve that by generating PDFs at scale using your existing business tools as editors, starting with Excel! Problem - PDF Sucks. Even more so for developers Let’s face it, PDFs are a necessary evil for any organization. When working on a no-code tool, our clients wanted PDFs as part of their workflows for multiple use cases - sending invoices to customers, generating work orders, providing reports to their upper management, generating timesheet logs, and more. Given that PDFs were not core to what we did - we wanted to integrate an existing API that was built on top of the daily business applications that our clients used, rather than building from scratch. Easy right? Unfortunately, not! We spent considerable time looking for an existing solution that could help us quickly implement PDFs at scale for our clients. After spending 2+ months searching for a tool that can do this - we gave up because: - Custom PDF Template Creation Takes Time - and it is not what devs should do. Many a time there was a lot of custom dev work, where the clients would give us a template in either Word, Excel, or PPT, and we would convert it into HTML, map the dynamic variables, and integrate it into our existing product. We would do this from scratch every single time. - Existing Tools used complex PDF editors - the existing solutions had their own editors which again took a considerable amount of dev time to convert the client’s document into an interface that was compatible with the editor. This makes both the creation and editing of these templates a cumbersome affair We eventually built our own Excel to PDF filling tool - which brought down the time to create PDFs at scale from weeks to minutes. We are now launching it as a separate product. The Solution - PDFHippo PDF Hippo uses existing business tools (starting with Excel now - with plans to add Word, PPT, and Google Suite in the upcoming month) as an editor that helps you generate APIs that output data onto these tools before converting them into PDFs. This eliminates the time to create new PDF templates from scratch and the need to convert the existing business document to a new editor! The best part is that it’s really easy to modify the templates as and when needed! Getting started is really easy! We have around 15+ templates for a variety of use cases. You can check out the product from this link - https://app.pdfhippo.com/ - and get started with generating PDF APIs in 5 minutes! You can check a quick walkthrough here: https://youtu.be/H_39oWEnxBw Who is PDFHippo useful for? - If you are building a SaaS product and need to integrate PDFs and documentation for your customers - PDFHippo can help in handling the documentation stack for you - If you are building a B2C product and need to regularly share billing, invoices, or other transactional documents with your customers - If you are an agency and need to regularly build products for your clients that involve documentation and PDFs - If you are using existing no-code or SaaS tools - and they do not have a PDF element (surprisingly, most don’t) - If you ever have pulled your hairs out thinking about just how complex managing PDFs is as a developer! Special PH Offer We are also running a special PH offer today for the community! You can get started today - and get 50% OFF for life for any of your plans. Use the CODE : PROMO50 Please give it a spin and let us know what you think in the comments. We are excited to hear your feedback. The team and I are here throughout the day to answer any queries!