Foxit PDF SDK Pricing, Foxit SDK Pricing and What the Foxit Cloud API Costs per Document

Foxit PDF SDK pricing is not published. Every Foxit SDK is quoted by sales after a free 30 day trial, "licensed per deployment model and platform". The only Foxit developer product with a public price is its cloud API: free for 500 credits a year, $1,750 a year for 5,000 credits (Startup) and $4,500 a year for 15,000 (Business), where one HTML to PDF conversion costs one credit. For a SaaS that only needs to turn its own HTML into PDFs, that works out to $0.30 to $0.35 a document, against about $0.02 on a render API like SitePDF at the same volume. Below we price a real workload three ways.

What Foxit publishes, checked 29 September 2026

We went looking for an SDK price on every Foxit page a buyer would try. The pricing URLs under the SDK paths on developers.foxit.com and foxit.com return a 404, the Foxit store links to the SDKs without a price, and the PDF SDK product page offers Request a Quote with the line that sales engineers will "create a license that suits your needs". The one new piece of information is the licensing model itself. Foxit's SDK FAQ now says the SDK "is licensed per deployment model and platform, with predictable pricing that scales with your product and no hidden renewal fees", and that "a Foxit specialist scopes the right production license" after the trial.

So any figure you have seen for Foxit PDF SDK on a directory site is either an old quote someone shared or a guess. We do not repeat them. What you can plan with is the structure: a separate license per platform you ship on (web, server, desktop, mobile), priced by how you deploy, negotiated once your proof of concept works.

The cloud API is different. Its pricing page at app.developer-api.foxit.com/pricing (the older developer-api.foxit.com/pricing address now returns a 404) sells "One Plan. Shared Credits Across Foxit APIs", one account level pool for eSign, PDF Services, Document Generation and PDF Embed.

The rate card is short: "1 credit per operation. 5 per envelope." Converting HTML, Word, Excel or PowerPoint to PDF is one credit, generating a PDF from a template is one, and so are merge, compress, watermark, redact and flatten. Foxit's docs add that only successful requests are billed, and uploads, status polling and downloads are free. Two rules matter more than the rate. Billing is annual and "credits reset when they renew rather than rolling over". And there is no overage: API calls that need credits "stop processing until your credits renew or you upgrade your plan", returning HTTP 429. Top up credits exist but carry no published price. (Foxit's API reference also lists $168 and $431 a month billed monthly for Startup and Business; the pricing page offers annual billing only, so treat those as unconfirmed.)

The workload we are pricing

A US staffing platform places contract workers with mid-size employers. Its app already renders two documents as HTML pages: a contractor agreement for each new placement, about 400 a month, and a weekly timesheet invoice for each client, about 800 a month. That is 1,200 PDFs a month, or 14,400 a year, and every invoice gets a one page remittance cover merged onto the front. The agreements need signatures; the invoices do not. After signing, the agreements go into the client's own repository, often contract management software that tracks renewal and notice dates, so the platform only has to produce a clean, final PDF.

The engineering lead shortlisted Foxit because one vendor can render, merge and sign. Finance asked for a yearly number.

Three ways to buy it, priced

Three things jump out. First, the render only line fits Business with 600 credits to spare, which is two weeks of slack for the whole year. One strong quarter of new placements and the account stops rendering in November, because nothing rolls over and there is no automatic overage. Second, the merge step alone pushes the workload past the largest published plan. A per operation meter charges for every step of a pipeline, so the same invoice costs twice as much the moment it gets a cover page. Third, signing moves everything into a sales conversation.

On SitePDF the cover page is simply part of the invoice HTML, so there is no second operation to pay for, and 1,200 documents a month sit inside a tier built for 10,000. Each render can also archive the source page with a timestamp, which is useful when a client disputes what an invoice said. Signing is a separate purchase on this route; our e-signature API pricing comparison prices the published options at 400 envelopes a month.

When the Foxit quote is worth asking for

We would not tell every team to skip Foxit. The SDK and the API are the right buy in a few specific cases:

1. You need PDF features inside your own app, not just PDF output: a viewer, annotation, form filling, redaction or editing in the browser. That is what the Foxit SDK is for, and a render API does none of it.
2. Documents cannot leave your infrastructure. A self-hosted SDK license keeps processing on your servers, which some healthcare, government and financial customers require in their contracts.
3. Your files are huge and your volume is small. Foxit bills one credit per operation regardless of file size or page count, so a few hundred 300 page documents a year fit easily inside Startup.
4. You want render and sign on one bill. One shared pool is simpler to manage, and at low signing volumes the 5 credit envelope is easy to budget.

If your need is the one in the example, turning HTML you already have into PDFs at volume, the per operation meter is the expensive way to buy it. The same pattern shows up on Nutrient's PSPDFKit API, which also charges each pipeline step, and our PDF SDK pricing survey shows which of the ten SDK vendors publish a price at all.

Questions to put to Foxit sales

If you do request a quote, these five questions turn it into a number you can compare:

1. Which platforms does the license cover? Server only, or also web and mobile, since "per deployment model and platform" means each one can be a separate line.
2. Is it per server, per application or per end customer? For a multi tenant SaaS this decides whether growth raises the price.
3. What does the renewal cost, and what does it include? Foxit says there are no hidden renewal fees; get the renewal figure in writing anyway.
4. For the API, what does a top up cost, and when do top up credits expire? Foxit says they expire at your plan's reset date.
5. What happens at the credit limit? Ask whether sales can enable an overage so production does not stop with a 429.

What the render call looks like

Foxit's HTML to PDF endpoint is asynchronous: you upload the HTML file, start the conversion, poll the task and download the result. On SitePDF it is one request that returns a hosted PDF link. This is the timesheet invoice from the example, with the cover page as the first section of the same HTML:

const res = await fetch('https://api.sitepdf.com/v1/render', {
  method: 'POST',
  headers: {
    'Authorization': 'Bearer ' + process.env.SITEPDF_KEY,
    'Content-Type': 'application/json',
  },
  body: JSON.stringify({
    url: `https://app.example.com/invoices/${invoiceId}/print`,
    format: 'Letter',
    footer_html: '<div style="font-size:9px;width:100%;text-align:center">Page <span class="pageNumber"></span> of <span class="totalPages"></span></div>',
    archive: true,
  }),
});
const { pdf_url, archive } = await res.json();

If you are comparing hosted and self-hosted report servers at the same time, our jsreport pricing page prices a per instance license and a per second meter against the same volumes. And for the full list of what a render costs across the market, see PDF API pricing compared, or go straight to SitePDF's plans.