✦ Orion — the premium PDF editor that costs one euro

Orion is a complete, self-hostable PDF editor that runs entirely in the browser. Files never leave the user's device — there is no upload, no backend, no per-user processing cost. That is what makes the €1 price point work: your only recurring cost is static hosting, which is free on every major platform.

Features

Stargazer (Free trial — €0, 1 document)

The landing page loads with no gate, and the editor opens freely. A visitor's first document gets the core toolset — viewing, zooming, find, annotations (text, pen, shapes, highlight), and page organization. Premium tools (text editing, find & replace, signatures, stamps, watermarks, page numbers, forms, merging, extraction, metadata, optimize, badge-free export) stay locked during the trial. When they open a second document, the editor shows the upgrade popup (buy €1 / activate a key). The try counter lives in localStorage (orion.trial.v1); the limit is limits.freeTries in public/js/config.js.

• Core tools for 1 document — no sign-up
• Exports carry a small "Made with Orion" badge until Premium
• Full keyboard map (see the in-app Help → Keyboard Shortcuts dialog)

The editor

A desktop-class shell: File / Edit / View / Tools / Help menu bar with shortcuts, a main toolbar, a left icon rail (Pages · Marks · Files · Notes panels), a right properties rail (colors, stroke, opacity, font), a status bar, and a right-click context menu.

• Open, view, zoom (Fit Width / Fit Page / manual), and navigate PDFs of any size
• Find (Ctrl+F) with highlighted matches and prev/next stepping
• Edit Text (T) — dotted boxes outline the page's text; click one and retype it inline, right on the page (rotation-aware); drag the border to move the block
• Select Text (I) — drag over page text to select it live, Ctrl+C to copy
• Add Text (A) — a box rides the cursor; click to anchor, type directly on the page, drag the dotted border to reposition
• Find & Replace (Ctrl+H) — one-by-one or replace-all across the document
• Annotate: text, pen, highlighter, area highlight, rectangle, ellipse, line, arrow
• Hand tool (H) to pan, Eraser (E) to remove marks under the cursor
• Move, edit (double-click, inline), and delete annotations; select all / cut / copy / paste; full undo/redo
• Per-annotation color, stroke width, opacity, and font family
• Rotate, delete, duplicate, insert blank, and drag-to-reorder pages
• ✍ Signatures — draw and place, exported as vector-quality PNG with transparency
• ⬛ Stamps — APPROVED / REJECTED / DRAFT / CONFIDENTIAL / REVIEWED / custom text
• ▣ Insert images — PNG, JPEG, WebP (auto-transcoded)
• 🖨 Print (Ctrl+P) — annotations burned in, straight to the browser print dialog
• ◈ Watermarks — diagonal stamp across every page, rotation-aware
• № Page numbers — four formats, bottom-centred on every page
• ✂ Extract pages — pull ranges (1-3, 5) into a new PDF, annotations included
• ☰ Form filling — text, checkbox, dropdown, radio; values written into the file
• ⚙ Metadata editing + Document Properties (Ctrl+D) viewer
• ◫ Bookmarks & attachments panels — outline navigation, embedded-file download
• ◉ Lossless optimization — object-stream rewrite, only applied if it shrinks the file
• Preferences (Ctrl+K): default color, font size, font family, author name

Premium (€1 / month) — the hero bucket

Everything above with no document limit, and every premium tool unlocked: text editing, find & replace, e-signatures, stamps, watermarks, page numbers, form filling, merging, page extraction, metadata editing, lossless optimize, and badge-free exports.

Enterprise (€79 / year · 10 seats)

Same software; you sell volume keys + priority email support.

The economics

• Hosting: €0 (static, client-side processing)
• Payment processing: Stripe's fee is the main cost per sale — on €1 transactions fees eat a large share, so consider the €10/year annual variant or regional pricing if volume grows
• Support: the FAQ answers the common questions; files never touching your servers means no GDPR data-processing burden for document content

Security & privacy notes

• Documents are never transmitted anywhere; there's no analytics and no third-party requests except Google Fonts (self-host the fonts to remove even that).
• License validation is client-side deterrence, not DRM. A determined user can bypass it — which is the correct trade-off for a €1 product; the price is the anti-piracy strategy. Don't store anything sensitive behind it.
• Keys are format-validated offline (checksum + salt). Nothing about the buyer is embedded in the key.

Honest limits

• Password-protected/encrypted PDFs can't be opened (a clear error is shown), and Orion can't add encryption yet — pdf-lib has no encryption support, so the Tools → Encrypt menu explains this honestly instead of faking it.
• "Edit Text" and "Find & Replace" work by covering and retyping — a white patch over the original run plus new text in a standard font. The original glyphs stay in the file underneath; text is not re-typeset or reflowed.
• Very large PDFs (500 MB+) are constrained by browser memory.
• The 2-try trial counter is enforced client-side (localStorage), consistent with the license model above.

License

You own your deployment. Change the salt, set your payment link, ship it. ✦