📑 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.
🔹 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
