[zihotki]

Some time ago at a $Company we needed to generate pdfs and also OCR incoming documents. In order to quickly release a product we decided to use online API from a $Vendor. Initial price was quite OK-ish but a year-two later we saw a significant increase in price. At that time we also started moving to on-premise hosting to decrease latency and to address other GDPR stuff. Considering high volume of documents it was just too much for us and the $Vendor didn't want to negotiate. In addition to that we also needed to implement reports to show to the $Vendor how many items we procesed for on-premise licensing..

Long story short, instead of that we spent a few two-week sprints of two-men team and were able to successfully fulfill our needs using open source software. $Company saved hundreds of thousands per year. We also tried to influence company to donate to OSS, that unfortunately never happened, but that's another story.

So please be aware of vendor lock-in and of possible price increase. Always think of a plan-b.

[tonyedgecombe]

>We also tried to influence company to donate to OSS, that unfortunately never happened, but that's another story.

I don't blame you for going down that route. But it feels to me that open source is devaluing our work. PDF is a big and complex specification, there must be thousands of hours of work in the software you chose and yet you are getting all that value for free. Is there any other industry that does this to itself?