I don't want to be <i>that guy</i> but can someone explain to me how this is better than word with templates? Is it the markdown-import feature?<p>#Edit. Perhaps that I just don't see the value as it's not a "trivial amount" for me, and I'd much rather spend some time going the DIY route with software I already have.
What is the reason this is sold as a SaaS instead of a traditional program?<p>A traditional program would have many advantages for the user:<p>* No limit on documents per month<p>* works offline<p>* Reports (which may contain company secrets) are not uploaded on a third party server<p>While other SaaS offerings always have some kind if advantage like having integrated support, I'm wondering whether a document converter (this is basically what it is) is the right software for a SaaS.
I've been beta testing this and it's been revolutionary — and saved me a bunch of money.<p>I spent ~$250 on a pages template to use for my reports. And because I write everything in Markdown, my workflow is:<p>• Write in Markdown<p>• Open up report<p>• Painstakingly hand copy and reformat Markdown to Pages<p>• Save as PDF<p>• Send to client<p>Now? I take that markdown, drop it into Remarq, and — BOOM! — I have a beautiful report that I can send to a client.<p>It's pretty awesome, you guys.
I suspect a bit of sock-puppetry on this thread. The demo PDF is nice looking, but there are many more ways to generate PDF from Markdown, via LaTeX or HTML. Most people willing to use Markdown instead of Word, Pages, etc. would know how to use tools like pandoc, I assume.
Nice designs, but my eyes almost fell out of my head when I saw the pricing. The regular price of the mid-tier is double the price of the highest Adobe Creative Cloud package!
Well done! Can we have a look at the markdown input source for the demo pdf? <a href="http://www.remarq.io/remarq_intro.md" rel="nofollow">http://www.remarq.io/remarq_intro.md</a> returns a GitHub Page 404. (Also, that url in the marginal note, on page 4 of the demo pdf, is broke, likely because of line-breaking.)<p>Which flavour of Markdown are you supporting? Do you plan to support _full_ Common Mark?<p>What are you using under the hood as your typesetting engine and stylesheet syntax? Pandoc, (La)TeX, CSS w/ Prince XML?
Confluence + word export? For similar price you get reports plus a wiki as well. I've been using that export recently and it works awesome. You need a word template, though, but that can be cheaply had through freelance designers ($20-50 tops). I'd consider this if this was a one-time purchase or like $5/month, but not for that price.
Overall the software seems nice, but there are just too many limitations which make this a bit of a niche software, IMHO.<p><pre><code> * SaaS. OK if your documents contain text only data. Maybe it contains a way to include images (I just don't see that from screenshots and description), but really no way to automagically run R/python/whatever scripts to insert actual data on the fly. Probably solvable with an API.
* Subscription pricing. If you have long running projects and publish [a batch of] documents less frequently than every month, pricing will start to really bite. I see that I am not alone that is concerned about pricing :)
* Template limitation. OK if all your documents are your own and not your clients'. Out of luck if you need to prepare documentation for clients. Maybe template customization is that powerful, but again, examples do not suggest that.
</code></pre>
Just my 2 cents though.
Interesting, but not interesting enough to warrant such a steep pricetag, in my opinion at least.<p>Yeah, this caters to the people who don't want to fiddle with pandoc or some other Markdown-to-$format tool, but even the cost (in terms of time spent) doing that would still be probably significantly less - and result in a more valuable end-product (since there would be no arbitrary limits) - than the monetary cost of this particular service.<p>Yeah, it's cheaper than hiring a designer every single time I want to create a document, but who the hell would do that? I would opt to have the designer create a template <i>once</i>, then use that template repeatedly, which would end up being much more affordable than this in the long run.<p>Nice idea, but the price is going to strangle this thing in the crib.
I used Remarq when it was in pre-release mode, and it is super slick. Basically it lets you write in markdown, but easily convert that to good looking PDFs. Perfect for sending reports to clients/bosses/etc. I'm sure there are lots of other good uses for it too.
Looks nice! The design of the example PDF is a bit noisy for my taste (the geometric shapes at the bottom of every page). And the demo PDF you generate by uploading a markdown file has a lot of whitespace. But I assume that's all tweak-able with a real account.<p>I got an "Oh no! We hit a snag processing your report. Markdown help." error without telling me what was wrong with the file. Seems like images break it.<p>For making these kinds of PDF I currently do this: 1. Write version controlled rst/markdown/creole. 2. Convert to HTML with a small script / command line tool (which also lets me do pre- and post-processing, like adding CSS). 3. Use chrome's print dialog to save the page as a PDF. This works pretty well for me.
As a consultant, I can see the value for someone who writes at least 1-2 reports a month. I tend to write a single proposal every few months so it wouldn't make sense for me personally on a month basis.<p>That said, I would recommend <i>not</i> lowering the price to capture low volume customers like myself. You are often better off with fewer customers who can easily justify the price vs. a larger volume of "cheap" customers. The "cheap" customer are often more demanding when it comes to support so in addition to paying less in the first place, the cost you more to support.
I don't suppose there's any plans for a Word export feature, is there?<p>Unfortunately, a lot of consulting jobs require all docs to be in MS Word format... Infuriating I know.
Holy smokes, definitely try the demo if you haven't already (midway down the page). The amount of time this could potentially save me is pretty wild. Well done!
My time isn't worth nearly that much right now, but Pandoc as a service is a great idea. Are you planning on buying LaTeX templates from other people any time soon? I've spent a ridiculous amount of time on mine: <a href="https://github.com/vaibhavsagar/resume" rel="nofollow">https://github.com/vaibhavsagar/resume</a>
Would really be great to show some examples of the beautiful documents that can be created right up-front. I assume that's a big selling point because nobody wants ugly documents. So, I'd take the time and display examples front and center (instead of the "icons" that are there now).
Looks cool! Will remember if I'm ever needing shiny documents. I agree with those who support a one-off transaction option. (For example, I love PlaceIt and don't pay them monthly, but they might be doing good business from people like me anyway. I see those in the same boat.)