I Built a Browser Extension People Actually Use in the US

#webdev #ai #programming #productivity

Honestly: the first few paragraphs of this story make it sound like the product isn’t needed at all.

“Another HTML to PDF tool?” — Ctrl+P, Print, two dozen converter sites, half the browsers can save a page already. Why would anyone ship the same thing to the Chrome Web Store?

I thought that too. I shut the project down more than once, because I couldn’t see why anyone would want another “Save as PDF” button.

The path was long and messy: idea → prototype → “this is pointless” → code again → doubt again → launch → first installs from the US that I didn’t expect.

If you stick around until the end, you’ll see two moments that made me finish HTML to PDF Converter: Upload & Paste Code anyway. Not “unique AI.” Not a revolution. Two gaps everyone pretends don’t exist.

Almost quit
Needed a PDF for a report. Online converter: sign-up, watermark, table split across pages. Ctrl+P on a long page — half the content missing. On an SPA — empty white blocks.

Two reasons I came back

PDF isn’t just for live websites.
An .html file on disk, or markup copied from an editor — Ctrl+P doesn’t help, online tools give you a blank page. What you need: Upload + Paste → preview → PDF.
Full ≠ Clean.

Full — looks like the site: layout, images, the whole page.
Clean — just the text, no ads or nav.
Edit before save — hide a block before capture, not in an editor after.

The US
Built it for myself. First installs — from the US, no ads: people Google paste html to pdf and find it.