I am using Printercow for another project of mine where I developed a POS-system where many thousands receipts need to be printed. This was one of the motivations. AI was kind of a afterthought. :P

Thank you for the detailed feedback! I really appreciate you sharing your perspective, especially about the compliance requirements. You're right, and you're not alone - many others in the thread have expressed similar concerns about the SaaS approach. After taking some time to reflect, I've decided to pivot towards a dual-track solution:

1. A free, self-hostable version for businesses with compliance requirements or those who prefer to maintain their own infrastructure 2. A cloud version for users who want a managed solution

I'll be working on both versions over the next few weeks. :)

That's great news! Seriously, kudos to you for taking such feedback so constructively. I do really think this could be a great path for you. Particularly once the core product is giong, you could look into add SSO, RBAC, and other enterprise-y management features and have a legit open product that makes money selling managed/hosted services to corps. This is niche enough yet common enough that I could see it being very attractive to people building higher level products!

Let me know if I can be of help. I've got quite a bit of devops/infra experience especially containers and kubernetes, as well as mostly backend dev (though enough frontend to be considered "full stack" by many, but IMHO I'm not great at frontend). Very happy to help consult!

Since this is basically just a thin wrapper around node-thermal-printer, how much of your SaaS revenue is going back to the author of that project?

Valid question. Printercow is aiming for a plug-and-play scenario where you can use whatever thermal printer you want with an extensive html-like template engine.

Great choice MUNBYN printers are awesome! Recently I found that NETUM thermal printers are even cheaper for comparable performance. :)

Sorry, this should definitely work. Try clicking on your avatar -> Manage Accounts -> Security -> Delete Account. Will look into this.

haha :D

I like this! Thanks for the feedback!

I have a home project that is actually a great fit for this, but a SaaS service would be a hard stop. Self-hosted or bust for my use case.

I mean, it would be a waste of _your_ resources to host it for my use case too!

Once it's out of alpha you can self-host this project

It sounded to me like once it’s out of alpha the pricing model is “TBD, but likely pay-per-print”.

I really like the proposal from black_puppydog here. Free forever self-host and a pay-per-print in case you want to have support or don't want to hassle with the infrastructure. Like Coolify is doing it.

Sounds fine to me! I’d also be happy with a reasonable one-time payment for the self-hosted version.

Speaks nothing against this - though give it some time to leave the alpha phase. Hosting is super easy using Docker and e.g. Coolify as PaaS right now.

Is there a public repo?

Not fully decided on the payment yet. Thinking about going the Coolify route with self-hosted and cloud option or with pay what you use (seems more software tending to this one). Happy for any feedback!