LightningPDF – HTML to PDF API with a native renderer and Chromium fallback

4 2 4 months ago

Three days debugging Puppeteer for an invoicing feature, memory leaks, blank pages in production, fonts not loading, I ended up shipping something that broke every few weeks. So I built a proper API instead.

The core is a dual-engine system: a native renderer for simple documents (under 100ms), and headless and cached Chromium for complex CSS layouts.

The API picks automatically based on what you send.

Other things I added: 1. Tailwind CSS built-in (no build step). 2. Markdown → PDF 3. Async job queue for batch generation, webhooks, and a visual template designer for the no-code path.

Free tier is 50 PDFs/month, no credit card. Paid starts at $9. https://lightningpdf.dev What would actually make you switch from your current setup?

mircerlancerous• 4 months ago

You may want to offer a page credits option instead, as "50 pdfs" for the free tier is a little vague. Is that 50 1-page pdfs, or 50 100 page pdfs? We generate our pdfs one page at a time, and then stitch them together into one at the end; I'm unsure whether your solution would be practical for us. Self-hosting is maybe the other option

LightningPDF – HTML to PDF API with a native renderer and Chromium fallback

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