iLovePDF API Pricing: iLoveAPI Cost per HTML to PDF File, Credits and Plans

iLoveAPI sells one currency for every tool across its PDF, image and signature APIs. The pricing page lists what each tool costs: HTML to PDF 10 credits per file, Office to PDF 10 per file, compress 10 per file, merge 5 per task, split 5 per file, PDF OCR 5 per page, PDF to Markdown 5 per page, AI summarizer 30 per page, image compression 2 per file, HTML to image 2 per file and a digital signature 80 credits. Credits are spent three ways, as the FAQ puts it: "per file, page, and task."

That design is convenient if your app does many different things to PDFs, because one balance pays for all of it. It also means the headline number on a plan is not a document count. The $38 plan says 10,000 credits. For HTML to PDF that is 1,000 files, for merges it is 2,000 tasks, for OCR it is 2,000 pages, and for signatures it is 125 envelopes. The calculator on the pricing page does this conversion for you if you pick a tool, but most quick comparisons skip it, and it is the single largest source of wrong estimates for this API.

HTML to PDF is billed per file, not per page, so a 30 page report and a one page receipt cost the same 10 credits. That is a genuine advantage over per page meters for long documents, and it makes the bill predictable: count your documents, multiply by 10, and you have your credit need.

The ladder has one oddity worth noticing. Per credit, the 25,000 plan ($98) is slightly more expensive than the 10,000 plan ($38): $0.00392 against $0.00380. The discount only starts at 50,000 credits and becomes meaningful at 250,000. Yearly billing takes about 20 percent off, which the page advertises as "-20%". Prepaid packs cost roughly 25 to 125 percent more than the matching monthly plan but never expire, which suits a seasonal batch (year end statements, a one time migration of old records) better than a subscription whose credits vanish each month.

The free allowance is real and recurring: the API reference says a new developer account "comes with a free 250 files limit to process each month," and the pricing page states it as 2,500 free credits. For HTML to PDF those are the same thing. If your app renders fewer than 250 documents a month, iLoveAPI costs nothing, and nothing on our price list beats that.

The job runs as a task in four requests: /start/htmlpdf/{region} to get a server and task id, /upload with the page address as cloud_file, /process, then /download. Requests are signed with a JWT built from your project key pair. The official PHP library exposes the render settings on its HtmlpdfTask class, and they tell you a lot about what the tool is built for:

• Viewport: view_width defaults to 1920 pixels, with an optional view_height.
• Waiting: navigation_timeout defaults to 10 seconds, and delay, the time allowed for JavaScript to run, "must be between 0 and 5" seconds with a default of 2.
• Paper: page_size accepts A3, A4, A5, A6, Letter or Auto; page_orientation portrait or landscape; page_margin in pixels, default 0.
• Clean up: remove_popups strips high z-index overlays such as cookie banners, and single_page prints the whole page as one long sheet.

That is a tool designed to capture a web page as it looks in a browser, which is exactly what the consumer iLovePDF site does with it. It is thinner for generating business documents from your own templates. There is no header or footer template, so page numbers, a running company name or "Page 2 of 7" come from a second task (the Pagenumber tool, another 10 credits a file). There is no Legal paper size. There is no "wait until this element exists" option, only a fixed delay capped at five seconds, so a dashboard whose charts finish drawing at second six prints without them. And the official samples convert a URL, which means the page has to be reachable from iLoveAPI's servers; an invoice behind your login needs a signed public link or a file upload.

For comparison, a SitePDF render takes either a URL or a raw HTML string in the same call, accepts header_html and footer_html, A4, Letter or Legal, orientation and margins, a wait_for CSS selector, request headers and cookies for pages behind a login, and allows up to 60 seconds per render. The options are listed in the PDF generator API reference.

Credits are charged per tool, so every step in a document pipeline is billed again. That is where the gap to a single render widens. Four common pipelines, priced at 10,000 documents a month on the monthly plans:

We are not pretending SitePDF does everything in that last column. It renders, hosts and archives. If you need OCR, Office conversion, compression or signatures alongside rendering, iLoveAPI does them from one balance and one integration, and that convenience has real value. The honest reading is narrower: if the bulk of your credits go on HTML to PDF, you are paying a toolbox price for a single tool. For signatures specifically, our e-signature API pricing comparison prices the per envelope vendors on the same job.

There are several cases where we would tell you to stay on iLoveAPI, or to pick it:

• Under 250 documents a month. The recurring free allowance covers them. Our lowest price is $14.50 a month on yearly billing.
• A mixed PDF workload. Merge, split, compress, OCR, PDF/A, Office to PDF, watermarking, image tools and signatures all draw on the same credits, with official libraries for PHP, .NET, Node.js, Python and Ruby.
• Data residency choices. The start call takes a region: US, EU, France, Germany, Poland, India or Singapore. Our renders run in one region.
• Batches that come and go. Prepaid credits never expire, so a once a year job does not need a subscription at all.
• Capturing public web pages as they look. The 1920 pixel viewport, popup removal and single page mode are designed for that.

If your job is turning your own templates, invoices, statements or reports into PDFs at a steady volume, the numbers point the other way, and the control you get over headers, footers and waiting matters more than the toolbox. Two other credit based vendors with the same shape, CloudConvert and PDF.co, are priced on one job in CloudConvert pricing compared, and the full field of HTML to PDF APIs sits in PDF API pricing compared.

Pull last month's tasks from the API's task list endpoint, which filters by tool and status, or count them from your own logs. Group them by tool. Multiply each group by its credit cost from the table above (10 for HTML to PDF, 5 for merge tasks, 5 per page for OCR, and so on) and add them up. That total, not your document count, is what your plan has to cover. If it lands just above a rung, the next plan up is the price, because subscription credits do not roll over.

Then take the HTML to PDF share alone and read it against the SitePDF columns. If HTML to PDF is more than about half your credits and you render more than 2,500 documents a month, moving just that tool usually cuts the bill by 70 to 90 percent while the rest of your pipeline stays on iLoveAPI. Put a few of your real templates through the converter at the top of this page first and compare the output side by side, including a page with late loading charts. If you are weighing other rendering services on price, the best HTML to PDF API comparison sorts them by the job each one fits.