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.
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!
I agree logically that discounting dollars will make it a credit system similar to the credit system you already have.
Practically though I think people derive comfort in familiarity, even though dollar credits / cost are unintuitive in mathematical terms, people use dollars daily, even people who don’t use USD daily know the conversion from local cut to USD. And it makes the cost look really small, for example “0.5 cents” per document seems more familiar than “1 credit” per document even though the cost might be the same.
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!
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?
You can start by making screencast of you editing a document, then visualizing the rendered document. You can use your browser in full screen mode and OBS for that.
Then, you can edit the video and remove any delays and stuff like that.
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.
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.
Why would credits expire? I like the idea of pay per use, but expiring credits plus the ability to only purchase in preset increments is a really bad idea. Even worse is paying more for credits that lasts longer.
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.
"_*Permanent liability*_"
Are you insane?
You have the cash in-hand. The customer has made an interest-free loan to you.
You're ACTIVELY trying to *DISCOURAGE* positive cashflow!?!?!?!?!?!
You should execute the exact opposite pricing scheme:
provide discounts to your most loyal customers who are willing to provide you cashflow long in advance of your incurring an expense to provide services to them in order finance your operation.
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.
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.
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.
Hi all, sole developer here! Creodocs has been over 6 years of work in my spare time and it's great to finally launch it!
The idea for Creodocs came about after I launched https://LaTeXTemplates.com and https://LaTeXTypesetting.com in 2012 and 2013, respectively. I noticed that academic documents and books consist almost entirely of content that changes across multiple instances of the template used to make them, but business documents are much more likely to consist of large proportions of static content. Think of receipts you receive from an online retailer; that company's information, branding and layout of the document doesn't change at all, but your account number, name, address and items purchased change.
I thought, well, what if I use the power of LaTeX to create virtually any design imaginable (combined with the ability to do math, use variables, etc), but abstract away the code (which is hard to master and archaic by modern standards), to allow users to specify just those dynamic parts of a document they need to fill out and keep the rest unchangeable.
Enter Creodocs, a document creation platform with a collection of templates available to all users, and the ability to add your own via a LaTeX template with variables specified. Variables each accept specific content types (int, bool, string, float) with a maximum length. Private templates can be shared with others, and there are billing groups to manage spending centrally. The idea is that a small/medium business would create (or have me create) a set of templates for documents they constantly produce, and then each of their staff (who don't know what LaTeX is) can log in and simply fill out a web form and get a consistent beautiful PDF document immediately. There is also the ability to create hundreds or thousands of documents at once using a spreadsheet, or create documents via an API without touching the website at all.
I'd love some feedback on the idea and implementation! At this stage, if you're interested in using it for your business, send me an email and you're welcome to use it all you want for free if I can get some feedback.
I'm also happy to chat about how the LaTeX world has changed in the last 10 years, or about how I've managed to have a steady stream of commercial clients willing to pay me to create custom LaTeX templates through my typesetting service.
My reaction to the expiring credits-based pricing was to feel anxious.
Also the fact that cost is not easy to calculate creates a barrier to understanding what the cost would be, which less-motivated people may not bother overcoming.
Ultimately, I don't know who is going to use the platform. It's created in a way that it can be just as useful for a random person who wants to make a few invoices per month, someone who wants to make 10,000 payslips every 2 weeks, and someone who wants to hook it up to their product to pump in data and receive a link to a PDF via the API. The first person would not pay for a subscription, it's just not worth it at their usage level. The second has burst bulk usage which should be discounted. The third has some level of sustained usage over time.
Those 3 use cases are covered by the 7 days, 30 days and 2 years pricing structures. If you're a casual user, pay a bit more and don't worry about expiration. If you're a bulk user, you get a discount. Everyone else can treat it like a subscription and get the best of both worlds.
I looked to websites that do similar things for ideas, and the closest I could come up with was sites like ShutterStock which also have a credit system where the more you buy the cheaper it is. I believe their credits expire after a fixed period too, but you don't get a discount for how long which is a bit more specific to my product.
Thanks for the feedback! How would you prefer to see a service like this priced that wouldn't cause price anxiety? I'd love to hear different ideas since this can be changed.
>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.
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.
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.
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!
If you're looking for feedback, you might want to put up a demo template or whatever other bit of the workflow that's easy to expose (at least, temporarily) so you get comments from HN users without the friction of sign-up.
You may wish to rethink the name, as you are likely infringing on PTC's trademark. PTC Creo (Formerly known as Pro/Engineer) is high-end CAD software, competing against Catia and NX.
When I searched online for the name there were essentially zero results for it so I'm surprised it would infringe anything. I'm not sure how trademark law works so I'll look into this though, thanks!
Google and Bing searches for "creo" give the PTC product as their first result. IANAL, but PTC could make the case that you are diluting their brand name by using it for your software, or worse, trying the phish their customers.
Potentially. If you stay away from mentioning or advertising anything related to their line of work (CAD software?) they'll have less of a claim of infringement. Also, trademark the name in NZ, if you haven't already.
IANAL, YMMV, etc...