ScrapingBee alternative for screenshots, without a monthly plan

Looking for a ScrapingBee alternative for screenshots? Here's an honest comparison. ScrapingBee is a web scraping API that can also return screenshots. Shotmint is a rendering API: screenshots, PDFs and Open Graph images, paid per render with no monthly plan.

Pricing at a glance

	Model	Price	Free tier	Unused volume
ScrapingBee	Monthly subscription (API credits per month)	Hobby $19/mo for 75,000 credits · Freelance $49/mo for 250,000 · Startup $99/mo for 1,000,000 · Business $249/mo for 3,000,000, up to $5,799/mo (a screenshot needs JavaScript rendering: 5 credits, or 25 with premium proxies, so Hobby ≈ 15,000 screenshots a month)	1,000 free API credits once (≈ 200 screenshots), no card	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

ScrapingBee prices are in USD and come from their public pricing page on 19 October 2026. Prices change, so check their current pricing. Shotmint prices are in EUR.

Where ScrapingBee is the better choice

ScrapingBee is built for scraping: rotating and premium proxies, stealth mode, geotargeting, CAPTCHA-heavy sites, AI and CSS extraction rules, JavaScript scenarios (click, scroll, fill forms) and dedicated APIs for Google search, Amazon and more, with screenshots (screenshot_full_page, screenshot_selector) as one option. Every plan includes screenshots, and at steady volume it is cheap per screenshot: about 15,000 a month for $19 on Hobby. If you scrape data as well as capture pages, need to get past bot protection, or take more than about 8,000 screenshots every month, ScrapingBee is the better choice.

When Shotmint fits better

You only need renders and your volume is low or irregular. 2,000 screenshots cost €5 once on Shotmint and the credits never expire, while ScrapingBee needs at least $19 every month ($228 a year) even in months you take a handful. Shotmint is made for rendering rather than scraping: the same credits cover URL-to-PDF and HTML-to-PDF (ScrapingBee has no PDF output), 1200×630 Open Graph cards, raw HTML input, and signed <img> URLs for live website thumbnails, and screenshots come as PNG, JPEG or WebP with retina scale, dark mode, transparent backgrounds, block_ads (ads, trackers and cookie banners) and hide_selectors. Every render costs 1 credit, failed renders are free, and a free key with 100 renders takes one request, with no signup. We have no proxies, geotargeting or anti-bot features, so for scraping protected sites ScrapingBee is the right tool.

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, ScrapingBee 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, DocRaptor. Yearly cost at three volumes: screenshot API pricing and HTML to PDF API pricing.