About a year ago we exhibited at a print show in Birmingham. Like every other stand, we needed the usual kit printed: lanyards, business cards, flyers. We have been building print software for over a decade, so this should have been the easy part.
It wasn’t. Our files came back rejected. Wrong colour mode here, missing bleed there, an image that looked fine on screen but was too low-resolution for the press. We spent an evening fixing artwork instead of preparing for the show. And it struck us: if the people who build print tools for a living are getting their files bounced, what chance does a normal customer have?
That moment put words to something we had been hearing for years.
We have spent over ten years building PitchPrint and Print.App, web-to-print editors used by print companies around the world. They are powerful, but they solve one specific job: letting a customer design a product in the browser. Again and again, customers told us they wanted something simpler too. Not a full editor. Just a clean way to let people upload their own files, and a way to know those files were actually good to print.
Because the files usually are not. They arrive in RGB instead of CMYK. They have no bleed. Fonts are not embedded. The resolution is too low. Today, catching this is a manual job. Someone opens each file in a piece of dated desktop prepress software, checks it by hand, and emails the customer back and forth until it is fixed, one file and one customer at a time. Plenty of shops have stopped trying to automate it at all and simply ask you to email your artwork in for a “free file check” before you order. It works, but it does not scale, it eats hours, and it is the least enjoyable part of the job. The files that slip through become reprints and refunds.
Now look at almost any print shop online and you will see the same thing: a plain upload button, or an email address, waiting to receive whatever the customer sends. There are thousands of them, probably millions, and almost none of them check anything. That is the gap we want to close.
So we built Filecheck.
Filecheck is the preflight and policy layer we wish we’d had at that show, and the one we think belongs on every print site. You drop it in place of your upload button. When a customer uploads a file, it checks everything that matters for print: bleed, colour, resolution, fonts, and more. Where it can, it fixes the file automatically, converting RGB to CMYK, adding bleed, embedding fonts, and it shows the customer a proof to sign off before the order ever reaches you. What lands in your queue is print-ready.
For a print company, that means you stop being the unpaid prepress department for every order. No more checking files one by one in old desktop software. Fewer rejected files, fewer back-and-forth emails, fewer reprints, and customers who get it right the first time without needing to know what “bleed” even means.
This is the first step. We are starting with print, because it is the world we know best and the pain we have lived ourselves, both as software makers and, that week in Birmingham, as customers. The goal is simple: replace the passive upload form, everywhere it exists, with one that actively makes every file fit for purpose, automatically.
If bad customer files cost you time, we would love for you to try it.