A developer friend messaged me last month. He's building a SaaS for accountants — small product, growing nicely. One feature his customers kept asking for: "Can your app just compress these PDFs before I email them?"
Simple feature on paper. Until he tried to build it.
He spent a weekend on Ghostscript flags trying to get the compression right. Then another evening fighting Docker images because Ghostscript wouldn't install on his Railway deployment. Then he discovered his compressed PDFs sometimes corrupted the text layer, which broke his customers' workflow. Then he realized he'd need OCR for scanned PDFs, which meant Tesseract, which meant another binary, more system dependencies, more Docker pain.
"This is supposed to be a one-line feature. I've spent four days on it."
This is the conversation that made us build the ConvertKr API. If you've been down this rabbit hole, you know exactly what he meant.
