PDF Generator API: HTML to PDF, With Prices Compared

Updated November 9, 2026 by Cyril Nicodème

Send PDFShift your HTML or a URL in one POST request, and the PDF comes back in the response. Your templates stay in your own code, the Chromium that renders them runs on our servers, and you can see what it costs before you sign up: free for 50 credits a month, then from $9 for 500 to $799 for 500,000.

Generate an invoice PDF from HTML with one API call

Your app already renders the invoice as HTML. Send that HTML as source, with your API key in the X-API-Key header:

curl https://api.pdfshift.io/v3/convert/pdf \
  -H 'X-API-Key: sk_your_api_key' \
  -H 'Content-Type: application/json' \
  -d '{"source": "<h1>Invoice #1042</h1><p>Total: $240.00</p>"}' \
  -o invoice-1042.pdf

The response body is the PDF itself, so -o writes it straight to a file. Got a URL instead? Put it in source and we load the page and convert it, no extra flag.

The same call from Node.js 18 or later, and from Python with requests:

const res = await fetch('https://api.pdfshift.io/v3/convert/pdf', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    'X-API-Key': process.env.PDFSHIFT_API_KEY,
    'Content-Type': 'application/json'
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({ source: invoiceHtml })
})
const pdf = Buffer.from(await res.arrayBuffer())

import os, requests

res = requests.post(
    "https://api.pdfshift.io/v3/convert/pdf",
    headers={"X-API-Key": os.environ["PDFSHIFT_API_KEY"]},
    json={"source": invoice_html},
)
pdf = res.content

Read the body as bytes, not JSON. If you'd rather have a link, add "filename": "invoice-1042" and the response turns into JSON with a url to the PDF, plus filesize, duration and pdf_pages. Add "encode": true and the PDF comes back Base64-encoded. Every parameter is in the convert reference (API v3).

What one POST to /v3/convert/pdf sends back, by the parameter you add. PDFShift API v3.

Templates in a visual editor, or your own HTML?

We render the HTML and CSS you already have, with a current Chromium. Most of the other PDF generator APIs you'll find in a search work the opposite way: you rebuild the template in their visual editor, then fill it with JSON. If your developers own the layout, that's a second copy of every template, in another company's editor, to keep in sync. Rather keep templates with us? Store them as HTML through the API and send only the data each time.

PDF generation API comparison: what 500 to 500,000 PDFs a month cost

We count 1 credit per 5 MB of output, so an invoice or a report of a few pages costs 1 credit. Here's the smallest published plan that covers each volume of one-page PDFs, and what it costs a month:

API	Billed by	500 a month	5,000	50,000	500,000
PDFShift	credit (1 per 5 MB)	$9	$39	$149	$799
PDF Generator API	credit (1 per 1 to 5 pages)	€43, billed yearly	€73, billed yearly	€296, billed yearly	not published
CraftMyPDF	PDF	$29	$99	$499	contact sales
APITemplate.io	PDF	$24	$89	not published	not published
PDFMonkey	document	€6.60	€29	€300	€2,500
Nutrient DWS API	credit (0.5 per HTML to PDF)	$75	$275	contact sales	contact sales
Adobe PDF Services	document transaction	free tier, 500 a month	contact sales	contact sales	contact sales
DocRaptor	document	$75	$149	contact sales	contact sales
Api2Pdf	MB and compute second	about $1.25	about $3.46	about $26	about $247

Prices as of November 9, 2026, billed monthly unless the row says otherwise. PDFMonkey's figures include its published per-document overage. Api2Pdf charges $1 a month plus bandwidth and compute time, so its figures use the 0.1 MB, 2-second PDF from its own pricing example. A heavier page costs more.

The more PDFs you make, the fewer of these APIs will tell you the price:

How many of the 9 APIs in the table publish a monthly price at each volume of one-page PDFs, as of November 9, 2026.

You shouldn't need a sales call to know what your next invoice run costs. Every PDFShift plan, up to 1,000,000 credits for $999 a month, is on the pricing page.

Webhooks, async and batch PDF generation

By default, your request waits until the PDF is ready. For long documents or big runs, add a webhook URL: the API answers at once with 202 and a queued status, then POSTs the result to your webhook with a link to the file. To skip our storage, set s3_destination and the PDF goes straight to your own S3 bucket.

A batch job is just more of the same calls: one request per document, in parallel, up to 250 a minute, with a webhook to collect the results. One conversion can run for up to 15 minutes on a paid plan.

PDFShift is a French company, and conversions run on our servers in France. We don't keep your documents by default. A PDF is stored only when you ask for a link (filename or webhook), on AWS S3 in Paris, and it's deleted after 2 days. For GDPR, our data processing agreement is public.

For health data, set is_hipaa: true on the request and sign our BAA. With it on, filename and webhook need your own s3_destination, so the file never sits in our storage.

Frequently asked questions

Is there a free PDF generator API?

Yes. PDFShift's free plan gives you 50 credits a month with no credit card, for files up to 15 MB and conversions up to 30 seconds. For testing, add "sandbox": true to a request: the PDF gets a watermark and uses no credits, up to 10 documents a minute.