pdflayer alternative for HTML to PDF, without a monthly plan

Looking for a pdflayer alternative? Here's an honest comparison. pdflayer is apilayer's HTML-to-PDF API, sold as a monthly subscription. Shotmint is a rendering API on headless Chromium: PDFs, screenshots and Open Graph images, paid per render with no monthly plan.

Pricing at a glance

	Model	Price	Free tier	Unused volume
pdflayer	Monthly subscription (requests per month)	Basic $9.99/mo for 1,000 · Professional $39.99/mo for 10,000 · Enterprise $119.99/mo for 100,000 (overage about 4¢, 1.6¢ and 0.48¢ per request; up to 15% off yearly)	Free plan: 100 requests/month, non-commercial use only	Monthly allowance
Shotmint	Prepaid credits, no subscription	€5 / 2,000 · €19 / 10,000 · €59 / 50,000 (one-time)	100 free renders, no signup	Never expire

pdflayer prices are in USD and come from their public pricing page on 20 October 2026. Prices change, so check their current pricing. Shotmint prices are in EUR.

Where pdflayer is the better choice

pdflayer has options we don't: header and footer templates, watermarking, PDF encryption with passwords and permissions, and document properties such as title and author. Its per-document overage drops to about half a cent on the Enterprise plan, so at a steady 100,000 PDFs a month it is a reasonable deal, and it comes from apilayer, a long-running API company with a single account for its other APIs. If you need encrypted or watermarked PDFs from an API, or you already use apilayer, pdflayer is the better fit.

When Shotmint fits better

Your volume is low or irregular, or the PDFs are for a commercial product, which pdflayer's free plan doesn't allow. 2,000 PDFs cost €5 once on Shotmint and the credits never expire, while pdflayer Basic is $9.99 a month for 1,000 ($119.88 a year, used or not). At 10,000 PDFs a month, Shotmint costs about €156 a year against $479.88 for pdflayer Professional. POST /v1/pdf takes a URL or raw HTML with A3/A4/A5/Letter/Legal/Tabloid, landscape, margins, scale and backgrounds, rendered by headless Chromium, so flexbox, grid, web fonts and JavaScript charts come out as Chrome shows them. The same credits cover PNG/JPEG/WebP screenshots and 1200×630 Open Graph cards, failed renders are free, commercial use is allowed from the first free render, and a free key with 100 renders takes one request, with no signup. We have no header/footer templates, watermarks or encryption in the API yet (our free watermark PDF tool runs in the browser).

What Shotmint does

• 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, and backgrounds.
• 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.
• A failed render never costs a credit. Every response includes an X-Credits-Remaining header.
• A real headless Chromium renders every page, so modern CSS, web fonts, and JavaScript work.

Shotmint is a new, small service. It doesn't have SDKs, integrations, or enterprise plans yet. If you need those, pdflayer may suit you better. If you want an API key in 10 seconds and to pay only for what you use, try it.

Other comparisons

ScreenshotOne, Urlbox, PDFShift, ApiFlash, PagePixels, ScreenshotAPI.net, HTML/CSS to Image, Microlink, Screenshot Machine, Screenshotlayer, Bannerbear, Placid, Browshot, Restpack, ScrapingBee, DocRaptor, html2pdf.app. Yearly cost at three volumes: screenshot API pricing and HTML to PDF API pricing.