PDFShift alternative with no subscription

Looking for a PDFShift alternative? Here's an honest comparison. PDFShift is a good product. Shotmint is a simpler, pay-as-you-go option for people who don't want another monthly bill.

Pricing at a glance

	Model	Price	Free tier	Unused volume
PDFShift	Monthly or annual subscription	Starter $9/mo for 500 · Boost $24/mo for 2,500 · Growth $39/mo for 5,000 · Business $99/mo for 25,000 (more tiers up to 1M)	50 credits/month free	Monthly allowance; no one-time credit packs listed
Shotmint	Prepaid credits, no subscription	€5 / 2,000 · €19 / 10,000 · €59 / 50,000 (one-time)	100 free renders, no signup	Never expire

PDFShift prices are in USD and come from their public pricing page on 17 October 2026. Prices change, so check their current pricing. Shotmint prices are in EUR.

Where PDFShift is the better choice

PDFShift focuses on HTML-to-PDF conversion, with a recurring free tier and plans that scale to very high volumes (1M conversions a month) at a low unit cost. If PDFs are a core, high-volume part of your product, its larger tiers are cheap per document.

When Shotmint fits better

You generate PDFs occasionally (invoices, reports, exports) and also want website screenshots from the same API key. 2,000 PDFs cost €5 once on Shotmint, compared with PDFShift's Boost plan at $24 a month for 2,500. Credits cover both PDFs and screenshots.

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, PDFShift may suit you better. If you want an API key in 10 seconds and to pay only for what you use, try it.