The number-one item on my wishlist for a product like this is the option to self-host, but I guess I understand if that isn't very financially viable. For the service you're providing, though, I think you could benefit quite a bit from open-sourcing the core technologies and then offering a package with support/automatic hosting/commercial licenses for business use.
I highly encourage you to check out speedata publisher [1] by the berlin-based developer Patrick Gundlach.
He is a well known figure in the TeX community and has created a (open-source [2]/self-hostable) document creation solution on top of LuaTeX.
You can simply run that from the command-line and integrate it in your workflow but it also comes with a server integration that provides you with a REST API.
Admittedly there is some kind of learning curve (even for LaTeX literate people as he is using an XML/HTML abstraction layer on top of it) - but that also keeps it interesting for users who have never played mich with any TeX-language prior to that date.
You're suggesting something similar to what Overleaf did: they're the most popular online LaTeX editor used by many institutions and are now open source. It's certainly worked for them!
I'm not strictly opposed to the idea of self-hosting, although it would be far easier to pull out the API + queue + worker elements of the product rather than allowing self-hosting the whole thing. That way you self-host the production side and the document data doesn't leave your servers (which is likely to be a big deal for many businesses), but your templates and API calls are compatible with the online version of Creodocs.
I'll try to get some more feedback on the pricing model and think about it myself, since it sounds like it's a bad one now. Thanks again for your feedback!
