About Gotenberg What is Gotenberg?
Gotenberg is an open-source, Docker-based API for converting documents to PDF. Written in Go and maintained by Julien Neuhart, it bundles headless Chromium and LibreOffice inside a single container and exposes them through a clean HTTP API. You POST your files as multipart/form-data and get a PDF back.
It's built for developers who want a self-hosted conversion service. The Chromium routes turn URLs, HTML and Markdown into PDFs with modern CSS, Flexbox, Grid and JavaScript support. The LibreOffice routes handle Word, Excel, PowerPoint and 100+ other Office formats. On top of that, QPDF, pdfcpu and ExifTool cover merge, split, encrypt and metadata operations. Most teams deploy it on Cloud Run, Kubernetes, or a plain Docker host.
The project is actively developed — the repository passed 11k stars on GitHub and ships frequent minor releases on the 8.x line. It's under the MIT license and has a healthy contributor base. Where it deliberately stops is at conversion: Gotenberg is a converter, not a template platform — there's no editor, no template store, no data-binding engine. That's a design choice, and it keeps the project focused.
Pricing
Gotenberg is free and open source under the MIT license — no license fee, no usage limits. The real cost is operational: you host the Docker image yourself, size the container for Chromium memory, package the fonts your templates need, and scale workers as traffic grows. For a few PDFs per day on a small VM, that's fine. For production workloads with bursty traffic and Office-format conversions, the bill for compute, monitoring and engineering time typically adds up faster than people expect.
