About Apollo's Templates

A side project with a nineteen-year head start

The site went live in 2007, back when building a web application meant writing most of it yourself and “the cloud” still mostly meant weather. It has been online ever since — through a full rebuild from its original hand-written pages to the site you are reading now, and through a long stretch where the most exciting feature on the whole domain was a printable bingo card.

None of that was planned. Apollo’s Templates was never anybody’s startup, never raised a round, and has never had a roadmap deck. It has always been the place where an idea gets built on a weekend to find out whether it works — and then stays online for a decade because people keep using it.

What Apollo’s Templates actually makes

Two things, roughly. The first is a library: more than 1,800 downloadable files spread across 16 categories — editable PDFs, Word documents, and PowerPoint decks covering everything from resumes and cover letters to calendars, invitations, business cards, legal forms, and gift certificates. You open the file, you type in it, you print it. That is the entire workflow.

The second is a growing set of makers — tools that build the artwork to your input instead of handing you a file to edit. Bingo cards, photo calendars, monograms, sports cards, jigsaw puzzles and a good deal more are assembled right in your browser and handed back as a finished, print-ready PDF.

All of it is free. There is no account to create, no watermark to pay your way out of, and no trial that quietly expires the week you need it most.

From a job application to a jigsaw puzzle to a kid’s trading card

The range is deliberate, and it is the part of this site we like best. On a single afternoon somebody uses Apollo’s Templates to straighten out a resume before an interview, somebody else prints a hundred bingo cards for a fundraiser, and a parent turns a phone photo of a nine-year-old into a trading card that gets handed out at the end-of-season party.

Those people have almost nothing in common except a printer and a deadline. That is the whole goal: reduce the distance between “I need a thing on paper” and having the thing on paper, whether the occasion is a career move or a Saturday.

Who builds it

Apollo’s Templates is small — a company in the paperwork sense and a workshop in every other sense. Its primary contributor is David Nelsen, who has spent a career building things and has been part of several startups along the way. This is the one that was never supposed to be a business.

“I’ve been a builder my whole career. This one is the sandbox — it’s where I get to try something just because it would be fun to make.”

— David Nelsen, primary contributor · LinkedIn

Which is also why the site is a bit of a laboratory. New ideas get a URL before they are finished, generators get rewritten because a better approach turned up, and whole sections appear because somebody wondered whether the thing could be built at all. If a corner of the site feels like an experiment, that is because it probably is.

Still being built

Something here changes most weeks — a new category, a maker that gained an option, a template redrawn because the old one printed badly on the wrong paper. Nothing is ever really finished, which after nineteen years appears to be the point.

If a template does not work the way you expected, or there is something you wish existed here, we would genuinely like to know. Send a note — requests are read, and a fair number of the pages on this site started as one.

Apollo’s Templates has been online since 2007. Updated through August 2026.