PDFShift

API to convert HTML documents to high-quality PDFs

PDFShift provides a REST API that allows developers to convert HTML documents to PDFs accurately, easily, and quickly with just a few lines of code. In addition, the product also supports many convenient accompanying features such as capturing and creating images from web pages, creating banners to share on social networks.

The product was built and developed since 2018 by Cyril Nicodeme, a French software engineer.

Revenue model

PDFShift generates revenue by charging a recurring fee based on the usage limit of the API, defined as credits. Each credit corresponds to a PDF conversion with a maximum size of 5MB. The lowest price starts from $9/month for 500 credits.

With this model, PDFShift currently earns about $9,000/month, according to information shared by the author on Indie Hackers.

Marketing strategy

PDFShift is promoted by being listed on popular directory sites and social networks such as Product Hunt, Twitter, Linkedin, or through reviews and ratings from the user community on sites like Capterra, G2, GetApp...

In addition, the product also runs paid advertising campaigns on Google Search to rank for relevant keywords and increase traffic.