📑 SharePDF: Building in Public
I am building SharePDF and sharing the entire journey here – progress, decisions, half-baked ideas, and everything in between.
SharePDF is an app that lets you upload PDF files to get a shareable link and track view analytics.
Website: sharepdf.app
🧱 Build Log
Updates won't be daily as I'm not working on this full-time.
🔹 March 01, 2026
- Uploads were taking a lot of server resources, especially during bulk uploads, so made the upload system better and now the uploads are very efficient. Now uploads hardly take even 100 MB of memory, even when uploading multiple PDFs at once.
🔹 February 28, 2026
- Added the bulk upload feature so now users can upload multiple PDFs, as per their plan allows, at once.
- Spent 3 hours fixing a super sneaky bug related to payment that showed 500 errors when someone clicked on the Upgrade to Pro/Max buttons.
🔹 February 26, 2026
- Re-imagined the analytics. Earlier, it only showed views but now it shows countries and referrers as well, and the data quality is a lot better now. I am using Cloudflare's Workers Analytics Engine for the data.
- Also optimized the uploading of PDFs, and have optimized the PDF loading for viewers as well.
🔹 February 25, 2026
- Implemented QR Code feature so now users can download PNG or PDF versions of QR Codes that will redirect to the specific PDFs when scanned.
- Bought another domain
sharepdf.link to prevent the main domain sharepdf.app from user-generated content abuse. Now, all PDF share links contain the new domain and not the main domain.
🔹 February 23, 2026
- Added multiple new features to the app:
- PDF link expiry after specified time and date
- Password protection for shared links
- Public links, indexable by search engines
- Implemented quick PDF upload feature where users can directly upload from the homepage. If they're logged in, it gets uploaded immediately otherwise asks them to sign up or log in.
- Also, planning to implement richer analytics for Pro and Max users. Currently, only shows views but thinking of showing more analytics data.
🔹 February 14, 2026
- Added the /blog page and also published the first blog post. I used sushi for publishing blog posts via Markdown files in Laravel.
- Also working on making a launch plan in ~2 weeks, but not yet sure how I will be launching it.
🔹 February 12, 2026
- Added a few new pages on the site:
- Added a new "why SharePDF" section on the homepage talking about benefits of using the app.
- Also thinking about adding some more landing pages based on use-cases, audience, alternative, how-to, etc. but not very sure about how to tackle this, yet.
- Talking to a friend of mine to handle SEO for SharePDF, because then I will be able to focus on the development part mainly.
🔹 February 10, 2026
- Dodo Payments has finally approved my account and payments are now live on the SharePDF app.
- From the first round of testing, everything seems to be working as they should. But I'm testing different things and have asked a few friends to test the payments as well.
🔹 February 09, 2026
- I have applied for Dodo Payments, as it was recommended by many people. Have submitted the documents and now waiting on their approval.
- Meanwhile, I have asked a few people to test the app, and it's running flawlessly currently. Just waiting to implement the payments.
🔹 February 02, 2026
- Last week I applied for Paddle payments but got rejected. They asked for processing statements but since this is a new app, how can I get the statements?
- I also can't use Stripe because it's currently invite-only in India.
- Thinking about other alternative payment systems I can use.
🔹 January 15, 2026
- Worked on link sharing options, and now shared links are even more powerful
- If custom slug is set, auto-redirects to the link with custom slug
- If custom slug is later removed, old URLs auto redirect to the current URL
- Using more secure IDs now – earlier 5-digit IDs were used with only lowercase letters but now using 8-digit IDs with also uppercase letters
- Made the protected PDF viewer better with more controls like jump to page, zoom in/out, fit to width, fit to page, rotate, etc. options
- Implemented caching PDF lookups and HTTP response caching with proper cache invalidation logic
🔹 January 14, 2026
- Implemented direct PDF access option, when enabled anyone can download the shared PDFs and LLMs like ChatGPT can also access and read the PDFs
- Added another sidebar menu "Preferences" from where people can set account-wide settings that applies to all PDFs
🔹 January 12, 2026
- Deployed the app to production on a Hetzner VPS via Dokploy, makes things so much easier to deploy and maintain
- Set up backups for the SQLite database file via Litestream, streams and saves everything to a Cloudflare R2 bucket
🔹 January 10, 2026
- The MVP is live, PDF upload, sharing links, and auth (email + social) features are working as expected
- Using Cloudflare R2 for storing PDFs, as I get 10 GB of storage each month and then egress is completely free
- Using SQLite as the database, even in production, because why not!
🔹 January 08, 2026
- Decided to use Laravel to build the app and started working on it already
- Using the Antigravity IDE for building this, currently I'm on the AI Pro plan
- Registered the domain SharePDF.app from Porkbun, costed $10.81 for a year
📦 Parking Lot
Ideas and suggestions I'm considering for some day.
Expiry dates for shared URLs: A feature to share PDFs for a limited time only, and then the share URL becomes invalid.
Lead capture: Opening URLs will show a lead capture form, and only entering a valid email will show the PDF.
Blog section: A blog section for sharing information about the app, educating the users, and will also be used for marketing.
📡 Public Updates
