Looking for a Prince XML alternative? Here's an honest comparison. Prince (by YesLogic) is a command-line formatter that turns HTML and CSS into PDF with its own layout engine, built for print: books, reports and long documents. You install it on your servers under a yearly site license. Shotmint is an HTTP API that renders a URL or raw HTML with headless Chromium, paid per render with prepaid credits and nothing to install.
| Model | Price | Free tier | Unused volume | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Prince | Commercial site license, yearly; other licenses one-time | Commercial site license (any number of servers, upgrades and support included): "around $2,000 per year for startups", quoted by volume and document type · Per-server license $3,800 one-time (government and non-commercial only; 12 months of upgrades, then $950/yr) · Desktop $495 (one user, interactive use) · Academic server $1,900 | Free non-commercial license: a Prince logo on page 1 of every PDF, no invoices, receipts or paid documents | No per-document limit |
| 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 |
Prince prices are in USD and come from their public pricing page on 22 October 2026. Prices change, so check their current pricing. Shotmint prices are in EUR.
Prince is the reference implementation of CSS for print, and Chromium is not. We rendered the same test page through our API on 22 October 2026: Chromium handled @page margin boxes and "page X of Y" counters, but printed a float: footnote inline in the text instead of at the foot of the page, ignored target-counter() cross-references and leader() dot leaders (a table of contents with page numbers came out with no numbers), and dropped a running header built with string-set entirely. Prince supports all of these, plus PDF/A, PDF/UA and PDF/X output, tagged PDFs, hyphenation and fine typography, which is why publishers use it for books and why DocRaptor runs Prince behind its API. It also runs on your own servers, so documents never leave your network. If you typeset books or long reports with footnotes, cross-references and generated tables of contents, or you need PDF/UA, PDF/X or PDF/A with accessibility tags, Prince is the better choice.
Your documents are invoices, receipts, reports, tickets or web pages, which Chromium prints well, and you don't want a yearly license or a binary on every server. Commercial use of Prince needs the site license (the free license puts a logo on page 1 and forbids invoices and receipts outright), and at about $2,000 a year that is more than a full year of rendering on Shotmint at most volumes: 1,000 PDFs a month cost €24 a year (one €19 pack and one €5 pack), 10,000 a month cost €156, and 50,000 a month cost €708 (twelve €59 Scale packs). A flat license only comes out ahead above roughly 1.5 million PDFs a year (our largest pack is €1.18 per 1,000). Credits never expire, failed renders are free, and the same key covers screenshots and Markdown extraction. Coming from Prince, keep your print CSS: POST /v1/pdf with "prefer_css_page_size": true uses your @page size and margins (custom sizes too), margin boxes like @bottom-right { content: counter(page) " of " counter(pages) } work, and break-before/break-inside control page breaks; see page numbers with @page and page breaks. Because it is Chromium, your JavaScript (charts, client-side templates) runs before printing, which Prince only partly supports. A free key with 25 renders a month takes one request, with no signup. If you need Prince itself as an API, compare DocRaptor.
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, Prince 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, Aspose.HTML, EvoPdf, PDF.co, 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).