Generate PDFs from Bubble

Documents from your Bubble app

Say you’re building a client portal, a marketplace or an internal tool on Bubble, and at some point your users need a document they can download or get by email. Generating PDFs inside Bubble itself gets painful quickly. With PDFMonkey, you design the document in our editor and your Bubble workflow asks for it when it needs one.

That covers invoices and receipts when a payment goes through, quotes and proposals filled with what users typed into your app, certificates the moment someone finishes a course, exports of a user’s data, and booking confirmations or tickets.

The plugin is free, and we publish and maintain it ourselves. A heads-up though: the marketplace also has an older third-party plugin called “PDFMonkey uploader”, marked as deprecated. The one you want is simply called PDFMonkey, published by PDFMonkey.

Setting it up

1. Create your template in PDFMonkey, with the visual Builder or in code, and publish it.
2. In the Bubble editor, open Plugins, click Add plugins and search for PDFMonkey. Paste your API secret key in the plugin settings.
3. Add the PDFMonkey - Generate a Document action to a workflow. Set the template ID, then map your Bubble data to the document data keys, which are your template variables. Filename and metadata are optional.
4. In the next step, use Result of step X’s Download URL to email the file, show a download link or save it.

The action waits for the document to be ready before it hands control back, so you don’t need a backend workflow checking on it or a webhook to catch the result.

What comes back

The action runs server-side and returns the document ID, the filename, the status, the failure cause when something goes wrong, and a Download URL. That URL is valid for one hour. If you need a link that doesn’t expire, the action also returns a public share link on the Pro+ and Premium plans and during the 30-day trial.

There’s also a List Workspaces data source, in case you want to fill a dropdown with your workspaces.

If you need something the plugin doesn’t do, Bubble’s API Connector can call any endpoint of the PDFMonkey REST API. Our Bubble guide covers both ways, with a complete invoice example.

Create a free PDFMonkey account, install the plugin and wire it to a button. If you get stuck, just ask us, we’re happy to help.

FAQ

Which Bubble plugin should I install?

The free plugin named PDFMonkey, published by the PDFMonkey contributor on the Bubble marketplace. You may also come across an older third-party plugin called PDFMonkey uploader, which the marketplace marks as deprecated. Don’t use it for new apps.

Do I have to handle polling or webhooks?

No. The Generate a Document action creates the document, keeps checking its status until it’s ready, then returns the result to your workflow. If you’d rather handle asynchronous generation yourself, you can call the PDFMonkey REST API with Bubble’s API Connector and use webhooks.

How long does the download link stay valid?

The Download URL returned by the action is valid for one hour. If you need a link that lasts, the action also returns a public share link on the Pro+ and Premium plans and during the 30-day trial. Or save the file to your own storage.

Is there a free plan?

Yes. The Free plan includes 20 documents per month, forever, with no credit card required. Every new account also starts with a 30-day trial that includes 300 documents. Paid plans start at €5 per month with Starter (300 documents per month).

Do I need to know HTML to design my template?

No. When you create a template, you pick one of two modes: the visual drag-and-drop Builder, or a Code template written in HTML, CSS and Liquid. A template uses one mode or the other, never both. The Bubble plugin sends the same data in both cases.

Where is my data hosted?

In the European Union. PDFMonkey’s application servers, file storage and rendering engines run in Paris, France, and its database runs in Frankfurt, Germany. A GDPR Data Processing Agreement is available.

Other no-code integrations

PDFMonkey also works with Zapier, Make, n8n and Glide. If your data sits in a database or a spreadsheet, we have pages for Airtable and Google Sheets too.