One night, scrolling through linkedin, I came across Zerodha's engineering write-up, “1.5 million PDFs in 25 minutes,” describing how they'd torn headless Chrome out of their PDF pipeline, tried LaTeX, and finally landed on Typst, a modern, open-source typesetting engine written in Rust. Around the same time I read how Zomato had rebuilt their own pipeline (they call it Espresso) to render and sign over a million PDFs in minutes.
What fascinated me most was that they'd taken different roads. Zomato squeezed every drop of performance out of headless Chromium with Go. Zerodha went further and abandoned the browser entirely for Typst. A 2000 page document that took 18 minutes with LaTeX rendered in about 1 minute with Typst, out of a tiny statically-linked binary. So I tried it for myself.
PDF was returned in milliseconds, and it looked perfect every time.
But Typst is a typesetting language and you have to learn it. So I kept thinking about everyone who just wants to create simple invoices, receipts, certificates or any document (founders, ops teams, designers, marketers) who will never want to learn a language just to generate a document.
That gap became the entire idea: what if you could get Typst's speed without ever writing Typst? I started with a rough proof-of-concept, a visual, drag-and-drop builder that quietly compiled down to Typst under the hood. I created an MVP which actually worked, So I decided to make it as a real product.
That's Cellystial: a drag-and-drop visual builder which generates template and a fast REST API to create PDFs in milliseconds. So you can start generating production PDF in less than 5 minutes.
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