Looking for a url2png alternative? Here's an honest comparison. url2png has been turning URLs into PNG screenshots since 2010, through signed URLs you can hotlink straight from an <img> tag, sold as monthly plans with no free account. Shotmint renders screenshots and PDFs from any URL or raw HTML with headless Chromium, paid per render with prepaid credits and no monthly plan.
| Model | Price | Free tier | Unused volume | |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| url2png | Monthly subscription, overage per 1,000 | Bootstrapped $29/mo for 5,000 (+$0.006 each extra) · Traction $99/mo for 20,000 (+$0.005) · Killinit $199/mo for 50,000 (+$0.004) · Enterprise custom | None ("Sorry, not at this time"); 10-day money-back guarantee | Monthly allowance |
| 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 |
url2png 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.
url2png is one of the oldest screenshot APIs (since 2010) and is built for hotlinking: every capture is a signed URL you can put straight in an <img> tag, served through the Fastly CDN and cached for 30 days by default (adjustable with ttl), and loading a cached screenshot does not count against your plan. Each plan comes with dedicated workers, overages are billed per 1,000 and rounded down, and it can inject your own CSS file into any page, wait for a url2png-cheese element before capturing, and set the Accept-Language header. It has community libraries for Ruby, Node.js, PHP, Python and others, plus WordPress and Drupal plugins. If you show the same thumbnails to many visitors for weeks and want a CDN-backed URL you never have to host, url2png fits that well.
You want to try before you pay, your volume is irregular, or you also need PDFs. url2png has no free plan, while a Shotmint key with 25 free renders a month takes one request, with no signup or card. 5,000 screenshots a month cost $348 a year on Bootstrapped against €78 a year on Shotmint (one €59 Scale pack plus one €19 pack), 20,000 a month cost $1,188 a year on Traction against €295, and 50,000 a month cost $2,388 a year on Killinit against €708. Credits never expire, so a quiet month costs nothing, and a failed render never costs a credit. You can still hotlink: /v1/screenshot/url returns a signed /s/ URL for an <img> tag without exposing your key, and a signed cache_ttl keeps repeats cached and free for up to 30 days. /v1/screenshot renders PNG, JPEG or WebP at any viewport and device scale, full page or a single CSS selector, with dark mode, mobile emulation, ad and cookie-banner blocking, hidden selectors, cookies and headers for pages behind a login, and raw HTML as input. The same credits cover /v1/pdf (URL or HTML to PDF with headers, footers and page numbers) and 1200×630 Open Graph cards. Custom CSS works too (the css parameter restyles or hides anything before capture). We have no CDN-hosted image storage, so if you rely on that, stay with url2png.
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, url2png 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, Firecrawl, CraftMyPDF, IronPDF, SelectPdf, Prince, 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).