What an HTML-to-PDF API costs: six services compared
Every pricing page in this category is built to be hard to compare: different quota units, different currencies, monthly and annual figures side by side. This page does the one calculation that makes them comparable — cost per thousand documents — and says plainly where we are the wrong choice.
Read on 1 September 2026. Every figure below comes from the vendor's own pricing page on that date, in the currency they publish. We have not converted currencies, because the rate moves and a converted number would be wrong tomorrow. Check the vendor's page before you decide — prices change without anyone updating comparison tables, this one included.
The number that actually matters
The monthly price tells you almost nothing on its own. A $15 plan that includes 125 documents is far more expensive per document than a $29 plan that includes 5,000. So divide: monthly price ÷ included quota × 1,000.
Sorted by that number, cheapest first:
| Service | Plan | Per month | Included | Per 1,000 |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| emitforge | Flat, measured at 50,000 | $89 | no hard cap | $1.78 |
| PDFMonkey | Pro | €15 | 3,000 | €5.00 |
| emitforge | Starter | $29 | 5,000 | $5.80 |
| APITemplate | PDF Basic, annual | $19 | 3,000 | $6.33 |
| PDFShift | Growth | $39 | 5,000 | $7.80 |
| APITemplate | PDF Basic, monthly | $24 | 3,000 | $8.00 |
| PDFShift | Boost | $24 | 2,500 | $9.60 |
| PDFMonkey | Pro+ | €60 | 5,000 | €12.00 |
| CraftMyPDF | Plus | $49 | 3,000 | $16.33 |
| PDFMonkey | Starter | €5 | 300 | €16.67 |
| PDFShift | Starter | $9 | 500 | $18.00 |
| CraftMyPDF | Lite | $29 | 1,200 | $24.17 |
| DocRaptor | Premium | $75 | 1,250 | $60.00 |
| DocRaptor | Professional | $29 | 325 | $89.23 |
| DocRaptor | Basic | $15 | 125 | $120.00 |
This table is not a ranking of which service is better. It measures one thing. DocRaptor sits at the expensive end and has been running since long before most of this list existed, with a support reputation people pay for on purpose. Cheapest per document and best for you are different questions.
Where we are the expensive option
Our cheapest paid plan is $29 a month. That is a bad deal for a lot of people, and pretending otherwise would waste your time:
- Under about 600 documents a month, PDFMonkey's €5 Starter (300 documents) or PDFShift's $9 Starter (500 documents) cost a fraction of what we charge. Our free tier covers the first 100, and then the next step is $29 — there is no small paid plan in between.
- If you need a visual template editor, we do not have one. CraftMyPDF, PDFMonkey and APITemplate all do. When a non-technical colleague needs to change the wording on an invoice without touching HTML, that feature is worth more than the price difference.
- If you need a signed SLA, we do not offer one, and the established vendors do.
We are the cheaper choice in one specific place: steady volume in the thousands per month, where the flat plan stops charging per document. Below that, look at the small plans above first.
Free tiers, side by side
Worth its own table, because this is what you actually use while deciding:
| Service | Free documents per month |
|---|---|
| emitforge | 100 |
| PDFShift | 50 |
| APITemplate | 50 |
| CraftMyPDF | 50 |
| PDFMonkey | 20 |
| DocRaptor | 5 |
PDFMonkey also offers a 30-day trial with 300 documents, which is more useful than its ongoing free tier if you are evaluating over a few weeks. DocRaptor's five a month is for smoke-testing rather than building, though its test mode is free and unlimited.
Confirm whether free output is watermarked before you build anything on a free tier. Vendors change this, and a watermark makes free useless for anything a customer sees. Check their terms, not a table.
Three traps in the fine print
What counts as one document
A five-page invoice might be one unit or five, depending on the vendor. If your documents are long, this changes the real cost more than the headline price does. Ours counts one file as one render, and a file over 5 MB as two.
What happens when you exceed the quota
Some services bill overage per document, some stop rendering until you upgrade. PDFMonkey publishes overage on its upper tiers only and sells 1,000-document boost packs otherwise. PDFShift publishes a per-credit overage that falls as the plan grows. APITemplate publishes no overage price and emails you at 80% and 100% instead. That difference decides whether a busy month costs you extra money or breaks your invoicing.
Annual prices shown as if they were monthly
Several pages in this category display the annual rate by default. APITemplate's PDF Basic is $19 a month billed annually and $24 billed monthly — a 26% difference for the same plan. Both rows are in the table above for that reason.
The free option nobody in this list will mention
Gotenberg is open source, self-hosted and free. It wraps the same Chromium engine most of the services here run behind their API, so the output is comparable.
You pay in a different currency: a container to run, memory to give it, and someone to keep it patched. That trade is usually right at high volume, or when documents legally cannot leave your own infrastructure. It is usually wrong when you have no ops capacity and would rather the rendering just work — which is what everyone in the table above is really selling.
If the volume fits, try it
100 renders a month, free, no card. The largest free tier in the table, and enough to wire it into a real workflow before any money is involved. Limits are published: 10-second timeout, 2 MB template, 10 requests per second, files deleted after 24 hours.
Said plainly, since this page is about honest numbers: we are new, run by one person, and there is no template editor and no SLA. If you are below a few hundred documents a month, one of the small plans above will cost you less than we will.
Questions
Which one is cheapest?
Depends on volume, and the entry price misleads. Below a few hundred documents a month, the small plans from PDFMonkey and PDFShift beat everyone's mid tier. Above a few thousand, the ranking inverts and cost per thousand is what matters.
How do I compare these fairly myself?
Divide monthly price by included quota to get cost per thousand, then check the overage policy and what the vendor counts as one document. Those three numbers explain almost every real bill.
Is there a genuinely free option?
Gotenberg, self-hosted. Same rendering engine as most paid services, no subscription, and you take on the server and the maintenance instead.
How current are these numbers?
Read on 1 September 2026 from each vendor's own pricing page. We date this page rather than quietly refreshing it, so you can see how old the figures are and check anything that matters to you at the source.