Show HN: Papermark – the open-source DocSend alternative with custom domains
papermark.ioHi HN! We’re Marc and Iuliia from Papermark (https://papermark.io). We're building an open-source, modern document sharing platform with real-time engagement analytics and 100% customization.
It all started as a tweet [1] and led to our launch on Product Hunt [2] last month. We crossed over 1000 stars and over 10 contributors on GitHub (https://github.com/mfts/papermark).
Incumbents, like DocSend, founded in the early 2010s have been acquired already and just don't innovate anymore. Their main priority is enterprise clients.
As founders and developers ourselves we always felt that our needs are not being served. We struggle to get actionable insights when sending pitch decks to investors or sales proposals to customers. We are missing the flexibility and integrations with our existing applications and tech stack.
That’s why we are building Papermark.
Our bigger vision
A developer-friendly document sharing platform doesn’t exist yet! We believe that document analytics should be available to anyone that is creating and sharing documents.
- Rich observability: Don’t get left in the dark when sharing a document. Papermark will provide full transparency by exposing all document-related events through webhooks.
- Fast performance: We are built on top of Vercel to serve your documents fast wherever your recipients are located and watching the engagement data arrive in real-time with Clickhouse under the hood.
- Developer-friendly: We will be expanding the platform with a clean REST API, so you can create, share, connect and expand documents that you are sending both externally and internally.
Let's stop sharing documents like it's 2013. I would love to hear your ideas, experiences, and feedback on any and all of the above. What issues have you had with document sharing?
[1] https://x.com/mfts0/status/1660980644065730561?s=20
[2] https://x.com/mfts0/status/1698596179578147142?s=20 Papermark user here (switched from docsend due to bugginess and bad support), big fan! Thanks Jake. Appreciate your support. I hope Papermark will continue helping you seamlessly share documents and Pitch Decks. Yeah, definitely an alternative that is worth to switch to Thanks for the trust jakozloski! Happy to serve you I have a couple of quick questions:
1. How does Paperkemark compare to DocSend in terms of features and benefits?
2. What advantages does Paperkemark offer for developers looking to adopt it? First about the comparison with DocSend. Papermark is 1. Open source-first: Papermark is 100% open-source and open to contributions. Host it yourself, fork it, modify it to your desire! Document infrastructure as never been so open and accessible! 2. Fully customizable: you can use custom domains to share a pitch deck or documents and custom branding. 3. Real-time analytics: we use Tinybird's Clickhouse under the hood to enable real-time analytics. We will also add more advanced analytics like heatmaps. 4. AI-driven: this is very much in experimentation, but we aim to add create specific usecases like creating summaries, memos, asking the document questions to Papermark. To your second question, we are working on a clean REST API that developers can use to access the full suite of Papermark programmatically. This will enable new usecases and integrate much better with existing applications and tools. We are still looking for design partners before we launch it. Been following for a while, really amazed at the rate of development, and some nice handy features too! Excited for the continued growth Thanks :) Let me know if you have any questions and if you're a developer, how you feel about deeper integrations with your tech stack / apps. Yeah, McAdam, the dev pace is amazing! Very excited to share Papermark with the community here. Looking for your feedback and ideas Not only is the product amazing, but so is the team that crafted it. This undoubtedly implies that the product will continue to develop and improve at a rapid pace. It's great that it's an open-source project. So, do you have any ideas about its future direction and what you'd like to develop next? Would gladly join the devteam. Congratulations on your launch here! Thanks Olena! why is this needed? There are many millions of documents being created and shared on any given day. However, the moment you share a document you have no idea if the recipient, whether a client, investor or colleague has actually viewed the document or engaged with the document in any way. You are completely left in the dark. Papermark is providing you actionable insights for your files. Just like you have Mixpanel or Datadog for your application, there is Papermark for your files.