That's a fair question, but our goal is the exact opposite. We want as many users as possible to try the service.
The challenge was that the costs associated with the initial free trials went beyond what our team could sustain. The recent changes are our attempt to fine-tune our model to find a balance.
Our goal is to offer a service that is both accessible for users to try and financially sustainable for us to operate and improve long-term.
You are absolutely right, and thank you for the direct feedback. Forcing a sign-up before demonstrating value is a poor experience, and we're sorry.
It’s clear we got this part wrong initially. It was feedback exactly like yours that prompted us to fix this.
We have now added a no-login trial so you can test the tool without creating an account. We know we have to earn your trust, and this is a direct result of learning from our early users. Thank you for taking the time to help us get better.
That is a completely fair criticism, and I am truly sorry. There's no good excuse for asking for personal information before demonstrating any value—it's disrespectful to your time.
We've learned from this and have now changed the flow to allow for a sign-up-free trial.
You are absolutely right, and we're sorry for the frustrating experience. Forcing a sign-up before you can even try the tool is poor form, and we apologize for wasting your time. As a new team, we're still learning, and this was a clear mistake on our part.
Based on this (very necessary) feedback, we have now implemented a no-login trial so you can test the tool without creating an account.
If you do choose to sign up later, we also provide some free credits. We have to cap the trial usage due to API costs, but we've tried to make it generous enough for a fair evaluation.
Thank you for the blunt feedback. We genuinely appreciate it and would be grateful if you’d consider giving it another look. We are committed to listening to our users and continuously improving.
I really appreciate you calling this out, and I'm genuinely sorry for the bad experience. The wording was misleading, and we should have been much clearer.
To be transparent, when we started, the AI model costs quickly became unsustainable with purely free usage. We had to introduce a paid model to cover these costs and ensure we could keep the service running and improving. It was a difficult decision, and we clearly fumbled the communication.
We've since added a free trial with credits for every new user. I know we made a poor first impression, but I hope you'll consider giving it another try. Your feedback is incredibly valuable and helps us do better.
Flux Kontext AI is a professional online AI image editor featuring unparalleled character consistency, precise local editing, and seamless style transfer. Experience breakthrough multimodal image generation with advanced editing precision and creative control for professional results.
Learn how to systematically map available online resources (APIs, tools, data) to validated user needs found online. Basically, getting better at connecting existing digital 'building blocks' to solve actual problems.
I'm currently trying to transition from a fairly rigid day job into working as an independent developer. The goal is to build useful online tools and hopefully create a sustainable income stream doing something I find more engaging.
One consistent annoyance in my professional work has been dealing with PDFs – specifically, extracting information into editable formats without losing structure. Copy-pasting often creates a mess.
I've focused heavily on trying to maintain good formatting for headings, text flow, formulas, and especially table structure (getting rows/columns right in Markdown). It also has an online editor for quick modifications after conversion.
A key aspect for me was privacy: the application explicitly does not save the content of uploaded PDFs or the generated Markdown files. It only stores minimal metadata (email, filename, page count) for registered users' plan limits.
It's very much a "scratching my own itch" project born out of that PDF frustration. Early days, but hoping it proves useful for others too.
The need for batch processing to pull out targeted data points from PDFs (rather than converting the whole document) is a valuable insight.
While the current tool focuses on full conversion to Markdown, enhancing https://pdftomarkdown.pro/ to handle specific data extraction tasks like yours is definitely something I'll consider carefully for the future roadmap. Thanks for highlighting it!
The challenge was that the costs associated with the initial free trials went beyond what our team could sustain. The recent changes are our attempt to fine-tune our model to find a balance.
Our goal is to offer a service that is both accessible for users to try and financially sustainable for us to operate and improve long-term.