Rendeer
Invoice. Receipt. Booking confirmation. Contract. Onboarding email. Every project eventually needs to generate a document, and by project number eight, we gave up and built the service instead.
If you build the same thing eight times, build it once
The moment of realizationEvery project we ship eventually asks for a document. The ask is never the same twice:
- A PDF invoice, branded, with line items and tax breakdowns
- A receipt email after checkout, localized to the buyer's language
- A booking confirmation with QR code and calendar attachment
- A contract, a signup packet, a welcome letter
The underlying shape is always the same: take a template, inject data, spit out HTML or PDF. Different fonts, different logos, different languages, same mechanics. Build that from scratch eight projects in a row, and the pattern becomes undeniable.
Rendeer exists because we got tired of being undeniably patterned.
POST a payload. Receive a document.
The APITemplates get uploaded once, through the dashboard or the management API, and keyed by slug with full version history. Rendering is a single HTTP call with a JSON payload. Want HTML? Request it. Want PDF? Add a format flag. Need the document returned inline or as a download? Set the header.
Templates support the features that document generation actually needs: conditionals for "tax applies only if", loops for line items, helpers for dates and currencies, and full i18n. One invoice template serves three countries with different VAT rules and different currencies, driven by the payload, not by duplicating the template.
Document features used to be a line item. Now they are a checkbox.
The economicsBefore Rendeer, "add PDF export" showed up on project timelines as a week of work. Set up Puppeteer or wkhtmltopdf. Handle fonts. Debug layout on A4 vs. Letter. Test across operating systems. Deploy the rendering service. Hope it holds up under load.
Now it's an hour of template work and an API key. The feature doesn't get scoped out of small projects anymore because it isn't expensive enough to scope out. Branded PDFs. Localized emails. Printable confirmations. All trivial, all standard, all powered by the same service that gets better every week.
"The best internal tools are the ones you build once and benefit from forever. Rendeer is that tool for us, every project that uses it gets faster, and every improvement we make to it lifts everything downstream."
Engineering Team