PDF Generator API: an API PDF Generator and PDF Maker API in One Call

Generating a PDF looks trivial until you do it in production. The hard parts are never the happy path. They are the invoice whose web font falls back to Times because the font server was slow. The report whose chart renders after the PDF was already written, leaving an empty box where the revenue graph should be. The statement that breaks across pages mid table, orphaning a single row of numbers on page four.

All three failures have the same root cause: something snapshotted the page before it finished becoming itself. A serious API PDF generator fixes that with a real browser engine and an explicit way to say "wait until this is on screen." Sitepdf renders in managed Chromium, so your CSS grid, your web fonts and your JavaScript all behave exactly as they do in a visitor's browser, and wait_for holds the render until the selector you name exists.

The rest is page mechanics: A4, Letter or Legal, portrait or landscape, margin presets, and header and footer templates with page numbers. Boring, and precisely the boring you should not be writing yourself.

If you are still choosing between rendering your own HTML and merging a Word template with JSON, the wider document generation API comparison sets the two engines side by side and lists what each vendor in the category actually publishes for pricing.

Here is the gap almost nobody in this category fills. You generate a PDF because a document mattered: an invoice a customer paid against, a quote you honored, a disclosure a regulator will ask about. The file goes to the customer. What stays with you is, at best, a copy in a bucket with no provenance and an editable timestamp.

Sitepdf treats the record as part of the same job. Add archive=true to any render and the page is also stored as a timestamped, immutable snapshot under your account, retrievable by id forever after. The document goes out; the dated record stays in. One call, one bill, no second pipeline to build and no second vendor to buy. Urlbox is the one other vendor that takes records seriously, and we say so on the comparison page; everyone else hands you the file and forgets the page.

If you only need the file, leave archiving off and the render is transient: we return the PDF and store nothing.

Both inputs are the same endpoint. Send html when your app already owns the markup, which is the usual case for invoices, receipts and statements rendered from a template. Send url when the source of truth is a live page: an order confirmation, a published price, a dashboard. The URL to PDF API page covers that path in detail, and the free in-browser converter lets you sanity check output quality on your own markup before you write a line of integration code.

Batch is the same call in a loop, run concurrently against your plan's limit, which is how teams push thousands of month end statements without building a queue of their own.

Sitepdf is in early access. The API opens to the list in order, and planned pricing starts at $29 a month, which early access members lock for 12 months after launch. Full tiers are on the pricing page, and every planned feature on this site is labelled planned until it ships, because a vendor that fudges its own status is not one you want holding your records.

Weighing this against the alternatives is a fair thing to do before you commit. We wrote the comparison ourselves: the best HTML to PDF API, seven tools compared, including the cases where a competitor is the better buy.