🔹 Aug 14, 2026
- SharePDF now has 450 users. It went from 400 to 450 in about 11 days, the fastest 50-user jump so far.
- Also, traffic from Google is slowly increasing. The site just hit 90 clicks in the last 28 days.
📑 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.
🔹 Aug 03, 2026
- SharePDF just crossed 400 users. The signup rate keeps increasing or decreasing over different weeks of the month, but I'm very satisfied with everything so far.
🔹 Jul 15, 2026
- The new version of SharePDF is already live and for the last few days, I have been doing multiple small tweaks to make the user experience even better.
- Now, I won't be adding any new features or making any major changes for at least a while, as it's already running very smooth.
- Also, SharePDF now has more than 350 users, and it's growing at a decent rate.
🔹 Jul 12, 2026
- Working on a completely new design for public and private pages, trying to improve the UI as well as UX. The new UI is pushed live, but I'm still tweaking it a bit to make it even better.
- Adding some default setting options for PDF uploads, like "make all PDFs public, always" or "all PDFs can be downloaded, always".
🔹 May 14, 2026
- Implemented the
.docxand.pptxuploads, so users can now directly upload Word and PowerPoint files, and they automatically get converted to PDFs.
🔹 May 12, 2026
- SharePDF now has 200 users and I have written a blog post about it as well. It took us ~4 months to reach 100 users and then only ~20 days to 200 users.
🔹 May 08, 2026
- Added a new feature "replace PDF" that helps people keep the original share URL while serving a new PDF via the same URL.
🔹 Apr 22, 2026
- SharePDF reaches the milestone of first 100 users. Celebrations. 🎉
🔹 Apr 14, 2026
- SharePDF now has more than 80 users. 96% of them are free users, but now it's validated that there is a demand for such an app.
- I did the first introduction post on X about SharePDF. Feels good to announce this to the public, finally.
🔹 Apr 02, 2026
- Implemented the custom domain feature, so now users can add custom domains or subdomains and then all future share links will contain their own domains.
- I also implemented the email capture option. When enabled, it asks viewers for their email before the PDF is shown.
🔹 Mar 30, 2026
- The app has been running very stable for the last few weeks, no issues so far.
- Thinking of adding a way to upload DOCX, PPT, and more files to be uploaded and shared as PDFs.
🔹 Mar 01, 2026
- Uploads were taking a lot of server resources, especially during bulk uploads, so I improved the upload system and now the uploads are very efficient. Now uploads hardly take even 100 MB of memory, even when uploading multiple PDFs at once.
🔹 Feb 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.
🔹 Feb 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.
🔹 Feb 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.linkto prevent the main domainsharepdf.appfrom user-generated content abuse. Now, all PDF share links contain the new domain and not the main domain.
🔹 Feb 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, the user is asked to sign up or log in.
- Also, I am planning to implement richer analytics for Pro and Max users. Currently, it only shows views, but I am thinking of showing more analytics data.
🔹 Feb 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.
🔹 Feb 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.
🔹 Feb 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.
🔹 Feb 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.
🔹 Feb 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.
🔹 Jan 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 that also include 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
🔹 Jan 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
🔹 Jan 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
🔹 Jan 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!
🔹 Jan 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, cost $10.81 for a year
📦 Parking lot
Ideas and suggestions I'm considering for someday.
Better UX and copy: Now that the app is live and working, the most difficult part is improving the landing page design, copy, and overall UX.
📡 Public updates
- SharePDF reaches 100 users (Apr 23, 2026)
- The first public introduction by myself (Apr 14, 2026)
- Amit tweeted about the MVP (Jan 12, 2026)