About PDFGeny

A PDF generation API built by one person who got tired of running browsers in production.

What this is

PDFGeny turns HTML, a URL, or one of forty document templates into a PDF over HTTP. That is the whole product. It exists because generating documents is a solved problem that keeps being re-solved badly: every team ends up installing a browser, discovering it leaks, building a queue, and maintaining infrastructure that has nothing to do with what they actually sell.

Why it was built

The immediate cause was wkhtmltopdf being archived. Thousands of production systems depend on it, its rendering engine predates the CSS people write today, and the replacements are either libraries you have to host or services priced for enterprises.

There was room for something in between: current Chromium behind a plain HTTP call, priced by document, with a free tier generous enough to actually evaluate.

How it works

Requests arrive at a small Django application, which puts the render on a queue. Dedicated workers own the browsers — one Chromium per worker, recycled every few hundred documents to keep memory flat — and hand back the PDF. A second engine, WeasyPrint, handles table-heavy documents where it is both faster and typographically better; you can pick per request with the engine option.

Nothing about that is exotic. The value is that it is already built, measured and monitored: median render 0.6 seconds, 8 requests per second sustained, uptime published on the status page from checks that run every five minutes.

How we work

Prices are on the pricing page. No 'contact sales' to find out what something costs.

The free tier is real. Fifty documents a month, forever, no card. It is enough to build and evaluate an integration properly.

Limits are published. Rate limits, quotas, payload sizes and document TTL are all in the docs, not discovered in production.

We say what we do not do. No self-hosting, no OCR, no editing existing PDFs. If PDFGeny is the wrong tool, the comparison pages say so.

Who is behind it

PDFGeny is built and run by Mikel Rougstone, who also writes everything on the blog. Support email goes to a person, not a queue, and the chat in the corner is answered by the same person.

For anything sensitive — a security report, a data processing agreement, an invoice with specific details — write to [email protected] and it will be handled directly.