BreezePDF

Productivity

pdf editor

SHOW HN2025

791points
182comments
#28of 3,837 in 2025
Top 1%of 2025 by points

How HN took it

MixedNo clear lean

18 positive, 31 neutral or asking, 7 mixed, 18 critical, out of 74 comments about the project. Thread score 0.00.

Privacy: 1 for, 6 againstExecution: 1 for, 5 againstIdea: 2 for, 3 againstPricing: 1 for, 1 against

The thread, comment by comment

Each row is a top-level comment and its replies, in HN's order. Select a cell to open that comment on HN.

positive neutral or mixed critical about another commenter or something else the maker

What HN said

What people liked

  • Useful free tool with no sign-up

    From 2 comments
    • Very nice, thank you !
      TheJCDenton on HN
    • You'd think at this point there would be a dozen solid competitors to Adobe Acrobat. You'd really fuckin think so. And yet filling out a pdf and signing it with a certificate…
      moffkalast on HN

Objections

  • Browser-based privacy is unverified without open source code

    From 1 comment
  • Cannot edit existing PDF text

    From 1 comment
  • Firefox already offers some PDF features

    From 1 comment

Requests

  • Edit existing text

    From 1 comment
    • yes, that's why the description says "add text" not edit :) there aren't existing packages that can edit existing PDF text in the browser, but I'll do it myself sometime soon
      philjohnson on HN
  • Open source the code

    From 1 comment
    • not yet available as open source. Open-source has two main purposes I think: trust, and customizing/integrating it into other products. On the first part, since everything…
      philjohnson on HN
  • Touch support and PWA

    From 1 comment
    • The service worker functionality can be expressed as a PWA! Based on the comments I'm thinking of heading in that direction. As far as touchscreen PDF editing, that is 100%…
      philjohnson on HN

Questions

  • Will the code be open source?

    From 2 comments
    • It's not open source at the moment, but I would consider it. Just have to think through it as once you go open-source it doesn't go over too well to go back. So, if I want to…
      philjohnson on HN
    • Thanks! As of now I don’t plan on open sourcing. I think open sourcing software that I plan to monetize would create bad incentives. There are several companies of note that were…
      philjohnson on HN

Alternatives named

  • Smallpdf and ilovepdf

    From 1 comment
    • Scrolling is now fixed! And just updated so that if you click outside modal it closes. Working on update now so you can edit text you've already added. Agree with you regarding…
      philjohnson on HN
  • Stirling PDF

    From 1 comment
    • Yes, though both of those send documents to their server which might be a concern for some people. And most people working with PDFs wouldn't know how to setup stirling locally.…
      philjohnson on HN
  • Firefox built-in PDF tools

    From 1 comment

Category, keywords, summaries and labels on this page were made by AI (Thread Reader v2) and not checked by hand. Each point links to the comments it came from.

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