Kat Manalac

PDF Hippo: Dynamic PDF API for Devs - Convert Excel templates into dynamic PDFs

Take your Excel file, map the variables - including tables & images - and generate your PDF Use existing business applications (starting with Excel) as powerful editors to generate PDFs at scale in minutes

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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!
Girdharee Saran
@krishnab1594 This solves one of the critical problems. Can we also add digital signature while editing?
@krishnab1594 @10xmarketer Yep we can!, you can configure it as a variable , thanks for the feedback!
Porush Puri
@krishnab1594 Wow! This is huge, such a time saver + opens with a room full of unlimited possibilities. Kudos to the team and congratulations on the launch!!
Valeriia Dziubenko
Hey there! I love the concept of PDF Hippo; it seems like a great tool for developers. I'm curious: how user-friendly is mapping variables and generating PDFs from Excel files? Are there any specific features or functions that make this process even smoother? Also, I wonder if PDF Hippo supports other file formats besides Excel. It would be great to have the flexibility to convert different types of files into dynamic PDFs. Keep up the amazing work! 😄🚀
@valeriia_dziubenko Thanks for the feedback! We are working in making the variables mapping more user-friendly, please refer to your documentation for more info https://pdf-hippo.readme.io/refe.... We are open to feedback to make it smoother! Besides excel, we are work on docs and keynotes to pdf. We are also adding couple of interesting functions with excel, will keep you posted in the docs!
Rahul Luthra
Looks like a really useful product! Congrats on the launch 🚀🚀
@rahul_luthra Thanks Rahul, do let me know what you think after using the product. It has a free version for you to try out as well.
Anna Kasumova
💡 Bright idea
Dear HIPPO team! Congrats on the launch! Idea is absolutely clear. Long time I used to work as a CEO in one advertising business and every day I prepared invoices (with a №, purposes, payer, date). It took a long time, then I started to do it in google docs, then convert to PDF, but the problem was also that it required formatting every time. Using such a tool like HIPPO can solve this issue.
Shibi Kishore
This tool looks promising! Congratulations on the Launch, Can't wait to use it!
Naveed Rehman
Congratulations on the launch! Its super exciting to see a combination of PDF and API in one solid platform.
@naveed_rehman Thanks for the support Naveed. Looking forward to hearing how your team is using PDF Hippo. It's free to get started
Shubham Pratap Singh
Congratulations on the launch🎉🎉
@shubham_pratap Thanks for the support Shubham. Would love to see you and your team try out the product as well. It's free to use!
Rajtilak Bhattacharjee
A perfect solution for developers who are struggling with PDFs. A generous free-tier makes it all the more lucrative. Congratulations on the launch guys!
@rajtilakjee thanks a ton! appreciate the support!
Dennis Aronov
Very interesting product, I can see that it has lots of potential to expand!
@dennis_aronov Thanks for the feedback Dennis. Looking forward to you trying it out and letting us know how we can do better as well.
Johan Steneros
This is a really interesting idea. Are there any specific use cases for devs to use this?
@jsteneros Hey Johan ,thanks for the feedback!, there are various use cases for devs to create dynamic invoice, reports etc using this. We've added sample docs for examples check out here https://app.pdfhippo.com/home/te...
Inderpreet Singh
congratulations on the launch
@inderpreet_singh1 Thanks Inderpreet. Do check out the product as well! It's free to get started and we'd love to hear how you use it
Fatih YILDIZHAN
PDF Hippo looks very promising. Congratulations on the launch!
Maria D.
Congrats Balakrishna & team on the launch!
@maria_dt Thanks Maria. Would really appreciate your team trying out the product as well. It's free to get started.
Shokat Ali
Looks amazing and helpful. Congratulations on the launch.
Karan M
Creating templates from HTML and PUG for PDFs used to be a real hassle, especially because client requirements kept changing. It took up a lot of development time. But this product makes it so much easier! It's a lifesaver, especially for generating reports with CRON jobs. I really love this idea!
Daniel Zaitzow
Launching soon!
Congrats on the launch! I can really see the use case for not having to do a ton of heavy lifting if your support docs / internal docs are currently in PDFs.
@dzaitzow Thanks Daniel, do check outthe product for your team and let us know how it goes. It's free to get started
Jatin Arora
Launching soon!
Looks neat! Would try it out with some of my excel templates.
@jatinarora Perfect, Jatin. Do let us know how it pans out.
Julia Girko
Very good app, it would help me a lot. Congrats on the launch!
Aadil Sheriff
Working in the servicing industry, most of my dev friends have vocalized their frustration towards PDFs. Hopefully, this makes the necessary evil easier to handle.
Stas Voronov
Great tool 👍
@stas_voronov Thanks Stas, would love for you to try it out for your team. It is completely fre to get started!!