Blog / Announcing our new pricing!

Hey everyone! Today is a big day for PDFMonkey. We’re excited to finally announce our new pricing!

We know many of you have been waiting a long time for this. Thank you for your patience and support ❤️

TL;DR

We’re switching to fixed plans
Three plans: Free, Pro at €15, and Premium at €300
New customers get a 14-day Pro trial
Plans will differ in documents volume but also in features
Transition period for existing customers will be of 1 month

Why?

You might be wondering why we’re changing our pricing today, and it deserves some explanation. We’ve always been transparent in our communication, and today is no exception.

First, it’s about you!

We’ve spent many months talking and thinking about our volume-based pricing, and our decision to change was mostly driven by your feedback.

For the past two years, we’ve received mainly three types of messages regarding our pricing:

Hi. Do you guys offer fixed pricing?
Hello, do you offer fidelity discounts?
We love PDFMonkey, but we’re not generating enough to pay you guys! What can we do?!

And the only answers we could give so far were respectively

No.
No.
🤷

So with this new pricing, we’re hoping to provide more accessible engagement steps that will cover most needs and budgets.

It’s about PDFMonkey too

When we created PDFMonkey a few years ago, we wanted to create a successful product. Our definition of success was (and still is) based on three criteria:

Technical success: being a working solution
Customer success: bringing joy to our users
Financial success: making enough money so we can keep working on it and grow

Regarding our technical success, we’re pretty proud of where we’re at today. The platform has been very stable over time. The transition to the new dashboard was very smooth and petty much unanimously welcomed. We know we have a long road ahead as we’ll need to scale, but we’re excited about the challenges to come!

When it comes to customer success, PDFMonkey far exceeded our expectations. Many of you told us how PDFMonkey literally changed your life! From spending nights awake. Watching over a big batch of PDF being generated. Dreading the one mistake that would make it all burn down in flames. To a no-brainer click of a button that would generate thousands of PDF in a few minutes!

When we read your love emails or your kind messages in the chat, we know we did it!

Financial success though… we’re not quite there yet.

PDFMonkey started as a side-project. Since then, we’ve changed our schedules to spend more time on it, but we’re still bootstrapping the company. This means that we (Vincent and Simon), are working as freelancers on the side in order to provide for our families.

That’s alright, but we’re hoping that changing our pricing will help us gain more traction and financial stability. Reaching a state of financial success would mean we could work on PDFMonkey full-time and grow the company to its full potential.

Introducing our new plans

Starting today, PDFMonkey will have three fixed-price plans.

A Free plan

Similar to the one we offered so far. You still get 300 documents per month, unlimited templates, unlimited previews. All our integrations (Zapier, Integromat, etc.) will continue working as before.

The main difference is that you will no longer be able to load external resources. This means that if you’re using images, CSS or JS files, you will need to either inline their content or switch to our Pro plan to keep working with them.

The Free plan will no longer include technical support through our chat. We’re still available via email if you have questions regarding your setup.

A Pro plan

Priced at €15 per month, this plan provides 3,000 PDF generations but also the following features:

Loading external resources (images, CSS and JS)
Technical support through the chat
Inviting a collaborator (we heard you freelancers 😉) [coming soon]
Automated documents deletion [coming soon]

This plan is also available as a per-year subscription for €162 instead of €180.

A Premium plan

Addressed to more mature and demanding clients, this €300 per month plan offers 20,000 PDF generations, all the Pro features, and the following ones:

Team management [coming soon]
Password-protected PDF files [coming soon]
Sharing URL, so you can directly email links to your documents [coming soon]

This plan is also available as a per-year subscription for €3,240 instead of €3,600.

How does it affect me?

The new pricing will be applied to new customers, starting today.

I’m already paying today

First of all, THANK YOU! If you’re already a paying customer, you will be free to switch to our new pricing anytime until October 8. Upon switching, we’ll issue an invoice for the documents you generated this month and will reset your generation count to 0.

Be careful that failing to switch before October 8 will result in your account downgrading to our Free plan, so be sure to switch to keep your documents generating properly!

I’m a free user right now

No worries, you’ll keep your 300 documents each month. If you’re using our sample templates (like invoices) and are using our custom Tailwind CSS it will continue working as expected. If you’re loading external images, CSS or JS files, you’ll need to either inline them in your templates or consider switching to our Pro plan to keep everything working.

You will still have access to external resources until October 8. This should leave enough room for you to decide the option that suits you the most.

What are external resources?

An external resource is anything that is triggering an HTTP request (hence the “external”). For a quick search simply look for any occurance of http in any tab of your template.

What is NOT an external resource?

The HTML/Liquid/CSS/JS written in the HTML tab
The CSS code written in the CSS tab
The data that are dynamically inserted in the document
Images inlined using data-uri or an <svg> tag
CSS inlined using a <style> tag in the HTML tab
JS inlined using a <script> tag in the HTML tab

What IS an external resource?

Any <img> tag that uses src="http…" or src="https…"
Any <img> tag that uses src="{{someVariable}}" with the dynamic value containing http
Any <script> tag that uses src="http…" or src="https…"
Any <script> tag that uses src="{{someVariable}}" with the dynamic value containing http
Any <link rel="stylesheet"> tag that uses href="http…" or href="https…"
Any url(…) call in the CSS tab that is using http or https

Ending notes

If you have any question regarding this change, we’re available through email or chat and will answer you the best we can. Note that there might be some delay as many people might have many questions, and we’re only two 😅

Kindly yours, the PDFMonkey Team.