Looking for a PDF.co alternative for HTML to PDF or URL to PDF? Here's an honest comparison. PDF.co is a broad PDF API (converting, parsing, editing, merging, forms, barcodes, AI invoice parsing) sold as monthly credit plans, popular in Make, Zapier and n8n. Its HTML and URL to PDF endpoints cost 9 credits per page. Shotmint does only rendering: a URL or raw HTML in, a PDF or screenshot out, at 1 credit per document, with prepaid credits and no monthly plan.
| Model | Price | Free tier | Unused volume | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| PDF.co | Monthly or yearly subscription (10% off yearly); credit packs only on top of a subscription | Basic $9.99/mo for 16,500 credits · Personal $24.99/mo for 37,000 · Business 1 $49.99/mo for 80,500 · Business 2 $99.99/mo for 159,850 · Business 3 $299.99/mo for 483,000. HTML or URL to PDF = 9 credits per page, so Basic covers about 1,800 one-page PDFs a month | 30-day trial with 10,000 credits (about 1,100 one-page PDFs) | Subscription credits reset monthly; credit packs never expire |
| Shotmint | Prepaid credits, no subscription | €5 / 2,000 · €19 / 10,000 · €59 / 50,000 (one-time) | 25 free renders a month, no signup | Never expire |
PDF.co prices are in USD and come from their public pricing page on 24 October 2026. Prices change, so check their current pricing. Shotmint prices are in EUR.
PDF.co does far more than render HTML: it parses PDFs to CSV, JSON, Excel and text (with AI options), extracts invoice data with AI, fills and adds text to existing PDFs, merges, splits, rotates, compresses, password-protects and converts to PDF/A, converts Word, Excel, email and images to PDF, generates and reads barcodes, and has stored HTML templates. It has official Make, Zapier and n8n apps, Power Automate and many other connectors, an MCP server, async jobs with webhooks, and SOC 2. If your workflow edits or reads PDFs, not just makes them, PDF.co is the better fit.
You only need to turn your HTML or a web page into a PDF (or a screenshot), and your volume is irregular. PDF.co charges per page: a 3-page invoice is 27 credits, so 1,000 three-page invoices a month need the Personal plan ($24.99 a month, $299.88 a year billed monthly). On Shotmint one credit covers a PDF of any page count, so the same 12,000 invoices a year cost €24 (one €19 pack and one €5 pack, plus 25 free renders a month). One-page PDFs at 10,000 a month (90,000 PDF.co credits) need Business 2 at $99.99 a month ($1,199.88 a year) against about €156 a year on Shotmint. Our credits never expire, so a quiet month costs nothing, and failed renders are free. POST /v1/pdf returns the PDF bytes in the response (or, with response=url, a link kept 24 hours), where PDF.co returns a link to a temporary file you download next (60 minutes by default on Basic). It takes a URL or raw HTML with page formats, landscape, margins, backgrounds, header and footer templates, page numbers and your own @page CSS. A free key with 25 renders a month takes one request with no signup, so a Make or Zapier scenario can get its own (see the Make and Zapier HTML to PDF guides). We don't parse, edit or split existing PDFs (we do merge up to 20 rendered URLs into one PDF and password-protect it), so for those keep PDF.co.
GET /v1/screenshot: PNG, JPEG or WebP screenshots of any URL, with full-page capture, custom viewport, retina scale, a single-element selector, dark mode, transparent backgrounds (omit_background), ad and cookie-banner blocking (block_ads), and hide_selectors.POST /v1/pdf: PDFs from a URL or raw HTML, with format, landscape, margins, backgrounds, header and footer templates, and page numbers.GET /v1/content: the main content of any page or PDF link as Markdown, plain text or clean HTML, with title, author and date, for LLMs and RAG.GET /v1/og: 1200×630 Open Graph cards from a title and subtitle, with signed public URLs you can put straight in an og:image tag.X-Credits-Remaining header.Shotmint is a new, small service. It has small Node and Python SDKs and integration guides, but no enterprise plans, SLA or team accounts yet (measured uptime and render times are public on /status). If you need those, PDF.co may suit you better. If you want an API key in 10 seconds and to pay only for what you use, try it.
ScreenshotOne, Urlbox, PDFShift, ApiFlash, PagePixels, ScreenshotAPI.net, HTML/CSS to Image, Microlink, Screenshot Machine, Screenshotlayer, Bannerbear, Placid, Browshot, Restpack, ScrapingBee, DocRaptor, pdflayer, html2pdf.app, Browserless, PDFMonkey, Doppio, CaptureKit, Pdfcrowd, APITemplate.io, url2png, Firecrawl, CraftMyPDF, IronPDF, SelectPdf, Prince, Aspose.HTML, EvoPdf, CloudConvert, pdfEndpoint, Abstract Screenshot API, GrabzIt. Yearly cost at three volumes: screenshot API pricing and HTML to PDF API pricing.
No signup, no card; the free key refills on the 1st of every month. If you need more, buy credits once: €5 for 2,000, €19 for 10,000, €59 for 50,000. They never expire, and they stack on top of the 25 free renders a month, which every key keeps. From a script, an AI agent, Make or Zapier, POST /v1/keys/free (no body) returns a key as JSON (openapi.json, no-code recipes).