VelNZ

The Damn Interesting podcast (no affiliation, just a huge fan) had an episode on this topic if you prefer to listen to this story: https://www.damninteresting.com/up-in-the-air/

This is exactly a scene in Blade Runner 2049.

Miele vacuums have classic designs and colors. The Miele C1 I bought recently is even made in Germany.

Don't forget that every time: "This time is different".

Personally I would save a copy in a standard format and make it available on a domain I control. I've done that in the past for scientific publications.

Reminds me of Calhoun's Mouse Utopia experiments: "Other young mice growing into adulthood exhibited an even different type of behavior. Dr. Calhoun called these individuals “the beautiful ones.” Their time was devoted solely to grooming, eating and sleeping. They never involved themselves with others, engaged in sex, nor would they fight. All appeared [outwardly] as a beautiful exhibit of the species with keen, alert eyes and a healthy, well-kept body. These mice, however, could not cope with unusual stimuli. Though they looked inquisitive, they were in fact, very stupid."

https://fee.org/articles/john-b-calhoun-s-mouse-utopia-exper...

I wonder if this is in response to a sudden surge in revenue following the previous announcement. I bought >$100 in Vita games and I'm sure many others started stocking up too. Whatever the reason, it's good news we have a year or two more!

That's a really interesting workflow, thanks for sharing!

Now I'm sorry for the slow reply! It started as individuals and academics, I was typesetting CVs and papers, but as time went on I have had more and more businesses as clients. Now it's about 80% businesses/institutions. I think a big part of that is the Showcase which shows some of my past clients who agreed for me to show the work I did for them publicly. It's a relatively large list now and clearly shows big and small companies from all over the world and gives confidence in the service. At least, that's what I assume, I don't bug my clients for how or why they went with the service. Happy to talk more, just send through an email to the address listed on the site at the bottom!

It just feels wrong to perpetually owe many people with very little benefit for accepting that burden. I don't think there's much practical difference between forever and 2 years for a purchase like this, but for the business the difference is huge.

I'm just trying to set explicit limits on liabilities. The alternative as I see it is to accept money to provide a service indefinitely, but have terms clauses that any purchased credits may be forfeited for any reason. Perhaps if that clause reads after more than 2 years from purchase then maybe that's fine. I'll think about it, thanks for the feedback.

I'm actually curious though, do many online platforms allow you to buy credits that never expire? The stock photography websites were one of my inspirations for the pricing scheme, and their credits certainly expire in a year or so.

Hey! I must confess I haven't actually read those myself, although I did recently buy Tufte's "The Visual Display of Quantitive Information", on which the Tufte class is based I believe. If you eventually get into typography in general, I can't recommend "The Elements of Typographic Style" by Robert Bringhurst enough. It's rightly called the typographer's bible.

The typesetting service sprang from the modest success of LaTeX Templates. The large number of visitors meant that I had a constant stream of questions from individuals and businesses asking about modifying templates to include/change this or that. I did the whole free support thing for 1 or 2 years, but eventually realized it's a never-ending thankless task and I may as well try to capitalize on this desire that people have. Like with Creodocs, I had no idea whether anyone would pay me for this. The number of existing services was very small. I made the site and linked to it from LaTeX Templates, which is the perfect place to advertise, and eventually I started to get a trickle of clients. My rate initially was something like $30USD/hour, which was an insanely large amount for a poor PhD student, and I even remember a client saying I was way undercharging for the quality of work! As I've had more and more clients, I've built up the Showcase page to show off what the service is capable of, and I believe this is an important draw to give legitimacy to the service and show what LaTeX itself is capable of. I haven't asked, but I imagine most of my clients come from LaTeX Templates so the key for me has been to provide something for free and then upsell to a paid service. Nothing new there :)

That's true, credits do obfuscate cost which is something I don't like about them. If a dollar balance is used and the majority of transactions do correspond to $1 spent = $1 balance, then that's intuitive (as you said) since we do that all the time with all our purchases. There was a time in the 2000's in New Zealand where some mobile phone companies would let you buy like $200 credit for $40, and then pricing of call's was some high rate like $2/minute. That's something I really really want to stay away from, since at that point it's very difficult to know what anything even costs. I'll definitely take your feedback into account, thanks!

Word/Google Docs/Pages/Writer are what-you-see-is-what-you-get editors (WYSIWYG). Overleaf abstracts away the content from the presentation somewhat due to the nature of LaTeX, but it still effectively provides a real time view of your document as you make changes similar to the WYSIWYGs.

Creodocs explicitly does not allow you to make any changes to the document design or layout as a user. Want to increase the font size? You can't. Want to make something red? Unless it's already red, you can't. Of course that's a major limitation if you want to make changes, but it leads to highly consistent documents. Of course any given option can be exposed in the template if it's important, but the point is that templates are static by default.

Further, the document types that are best for the platforms differ. Creodocs should not be used to write an article, book or any document where there is a lot of text and custom elements (figures/tables). What it's designed for is documents like invoices, recipes, signs; all documents where there are relatively few changes between multiple instances of the document type and text is the main dynamic content.

Hope that makes sense and helps!

I know one image is a bit cropped on the home page on mobile, but apart from that everything works as intended on my iPhone 11. I'm using Safari though. What bugs did you encounter?

I'll be adding a demo, a few others also commented on that. Yes, essentially you can fill out HTML forms for defined variables in LaTeX templates and get back compiled PDFs.

I really appreciate you trying it out and giving your feedback, thanks!

The lack of a preview and wasted credits on mistakes is something I'd like to improve in the medium term. The way it is now, content is completely separated from presentation, and I consider that a defining feature of the product. Of course, producing each document costs essentially nothing, and the lack of a preview may be very frustrating, so perhaps meeting somewhere in the middle in terms of a preview may be the way to go.

Your alternative models are excellent ideas and I will consider them as part of an overhaul of the pricing model, thanks!

The rendering happens in Docker on worker instances, but a pentest is something I will look to get as well. Disallowing things like including arbitrary files from the operating system in the LaTeX code is important, I agree.

They're completely different products with completely different goals.

Thank you, noted.

It's partly modeled on the ShutterStock pricing model, well, the on-demand part of it anyway.

Glad it looks nifty though!

Yeah, a free tier is on the table, particularly if there's little paid take-up over the next few months. The only issue is free comes with support and feature requests, and I'm doing this solo for now. As you said though, low-level users pose the same problem but at least they pay the server costs.

Pricing scheme will change, that's become obvious today!

Well, I also offer a service to create LaTeX templates, but yes, I know that limits the market and that's ok. I'm not trying to take over the world, I just want a "small Italian restaurant on the web", as DHH has said.

Good question regarding the advantage over mail merge. LaTeX is extremely customizable in the layouts it can create (see some of my past work here: https://www.latextypesetting.com/showcase), and the typesetting quality is top notch. From a technical perspective, LaTeX can do math, create functions, use variables, etc. For many use cases, and particularly if design isn't your priority, Google Docs and Word mail merge will be an easier solution and that's ok.

Thanks, my intention was actually to be as customer-friendly as possible. From my perspective, the customer can walk away whenever they want (they don't even need to unsubscribe), and they have choice for expiry based on their expected usage pattern/accounting department. Obviously I'm wrong though!

Hmm, that's an interesting idea regarding the membership. I'll think about that as an option. Regarding the dollar balance, I didn't like the idea of using dollars and then discounting how much a dollar actually cost someone, since at that point you're effectively using a credit system that happens to be called dollar. But a membership where you get a base number of credits per month/year and then the ability to purchase more as needed (with bulk discounts) could work and I like it!

Thanks for the feedback and the idea of how to fix it!

Expiration because selling something that never expires is a permanent liability.

My friend had the idea that I could make all credits expire in 2 years (for the liability issue) and simply discount the cost/credit for larger numbers purchased at once, perhaps that would make it less confusing with the 7 days and 30 days options available currently? Perhaps combined with an option to repurchase the same amount automatically once your previous purchase expired/was used up would be better?

Thanks for the feedback, I thought the structure was actually customer-friendly (no subscriptions and lots of choice depending on your usage), but obviously I'm wrong from the feedback in this post. I'm definitely hearing that that's something I need to change.

Thanks, agreed, I'll work on a demo page that lets anyone create documents for a specific template using the same form as someone who is logged in.

A gallery of templates like what you see when you log in is also on my TODO list.

You're suggesting something similar to what Overleaf did: they're the most popular online LaTeX editor used by many institutions and are now open source. It's certainly worked for them!

I'm not strictly opposed to the idea of self-hosting, although it would be far easier to pull out the API + queue + worker elements of the product rather than allowing self-hosting the whole thing. That way you self-host the production side and the document data doesn't leave your servers (which is likely to be a big deal for many businesses), but your templates and API calls are compatible with the online version of Creodocs. I'll try to get some more feedback on the pricing model and think about it myself, since it sounds like it's a bad one now. Thanks again for your feedback!

Thanks for the feedback! I tried to make it clear what the product does in the How It Works section at the top of the home page and a few simplified screenshots further down, but perhaps that's not visual enough. I personally like when products have short GIFs on the home page highlighting the main features of the product.

I did want to produce a GIF like that before launch, but I've spent over 6 years of my spare time working on Creodocs and I just really wanted to get it out already. I know I can pay someone to make the video, but since the product is likely to change visually, I'd like to learn to do it myself so I can remake the video after visual changes. Any suggestions for software to use?

Hey, there's quite a few LaTeX enthusiasts on HN!

Great question and observation! Currently, the platform doesn't handle external non-text assets at all. This is something I will definitely be incorporating in the future. You can submit a private template where you bundle your logo and any other images and those will compile as normal with \includegraphics{}, but users of the template can't submit images or other assets beyond text at this stage.

An image is a string of characters, so I don't imagine it will be too difficult to accept an image as a new document variable type, send it along with the bundle that goes to the workers, recreate it as a .jpg, and make use of it in the template. The difficulty then becomes coding the template in a way that if a user specifies a really tall or really wide image, the document still looks good.

Noted, and I really appreciate the honesty. I'd love to hear your thoughts on alternative pricing models!

Thanks for the feedback! I answered a similar question in this thread with my reasoning for the pricing model, but it's really good to hear that I should probably change it from multiple people.

Briefly, I wanted to discount sporadic bulk usage (hence expiry of 7 days) and charge fairly for long term availability (expiry of 2 years), with everyone else being in the 30 days bucket and treating it like a subscription.

I'm aware that a larger company would not want to deal with purchasing regularly and my thinking was that the 2 years option is great for that. Buy a bunch of credits for 2 years and forget about them. If you stop using the product, just don't buy again, I'm not going to nag you for money. I haven't set up alerts that your credits are expiring soon or you're running out yet, but that would be the next logical step if I stay with this model.

I'd love to hear your ideas for how else I could price Creodocs! I'm open to anything, this was just the result of trying to accommodate the most use cases.