About

An independent engineering company for documents at scale

XAD Labs builds and operates the document infrastructure behind high-volume PDF generation. We work at the end of the problem where general-purpose tools stop being the right answer — runs that start in the tens of thousands of documents and go into the millions, on pipelines built around one organisation's data and one organisation's rules.

What we do
High-volume PDF generation and document pipelines
Run size
Thousands to several million documents
Platform
PodPDF — podpdf.com
Based in
Colombo, Sri Lanka

PDF generation at scale

Most document work is straightforward until the volume changes the problem. A script that converts a thousand files does not survive two million: retries, partial failure, cost per document and the length of the run itself all become part of the design rather than details to sort out later.

We design the pipeline for that from the start. Statements, invoices, certificates and letters rendered from your own records, at run scale, with the same branding and layout on every page however long the run takes. Documents split out of enormous bundles, assembled into packets, read into structured data, or carried through a migration where every file has to be accounted for.

The pipeline connects to the system the data already lives in — an ERP, a billing platform, a warehouse, object storage or an internal API — rather than waiting on someone to produce an export.

And the reliability to match

Throughput is the easy half. The hard half is what happens when a run is four days long, part of the corpus fails, and the whole thing has to be answerable afterwards.

Each document is its own unit of work, so re-running one changes nothing else and duplicates nothing. Work is persisted before it is attempted, and workers pull at the rate they can sustain, so a slow stage throttles instead of dropping. Runs are checkpointed: one that stops at 1.4 million documents resumes at 1.4 million, never from zero. Every file carries an audit row from ingest to delivery, so at the end of a run you can say what happened to any single document.

Each engagement runs in its own environment, with its own credentials and its own retention window.

PodPDF, our platform

PodPDF is our own product and the self-serve end of the same engine: a REST API and web app for generating, converting, merging and editing PDFs. HTML, Markdown, images and URLs in; a visual template editor for invoices, receipts, labels and certificates; bulk jobs, webhooks and a dashboard. Credit packs at $0.01 per document, with credits that never expire.

We build it, run it and scale it ourselves, which is where most of what we know about PDFs at volume came from. When a project outgrows self-serve — a large archive, a run with a delivery date, documents that need handling rather than converting — that is the managed work described above.

Get in touch

A rough document count and a sentence about what needs to happen to them is enough to start. Write to zameer@xadlabs.com and we will tell you quickly whether it is a project for us.

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