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Comment by smoldesu | Hacker News Reader

>Credits may seem like a dark pattern of obfuscating cost and adding unnecessary complication. This is certainly not the intention and this section aims to explain why credits are a good system for you and for Creodocs.

If something seems like a dark pattern, it is. I hate to be the bearer of bad news, but the ultimate judge of what is dark/what's not is the end user, and sending them a leaflet about how good it is doesn't do much to assuage their fears. I understand your motivations here, and sympathize with you as a developer: but as a user, I couldn't justify integrating this into my workflow.

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

The number-one item on my wishlist for a product like this is the option to self-host, but I guess I understand if that isn't very financially viable. For the service you're providing, though, I think you could benefit quite a bit from open-sourcing the core technologies and then offering a package with support/automatic hosting/commercial licenses for business use.

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!

I highly encourage you to check out speedata publisher [1] by the berlin-based developer Patrick Gundlach.

He is a well known figure in the TeX community and has created a (open-source [2]/self-hostable) document creation solution on top of LuaTeX.

You can simply run that from the command-line and integrate it in your workflow but it also comes with a server integration that provides you with a REST API.

Admittedly there is some kind of learning curve (even for LaTeX literate people as he is using an XML/HTML abstraction layer on top of it) - but that also keeps it interesting for users who have never played mich with any TeX-language prior to that date.

[1]: https://www.speedata.de/en/ [2]: https://github.com/speedata/publisher

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