PDFShift pricing and alternative

PDFShift Pricing and PDFShift Alternative with a Dated Record of Every Render

PDFShift is a well built Chromium API with a real free tier and a $9 floor. If it does everything you need, use it. Teams come to us for the one thing it deliberately does not do: keep any record of what was rendered.

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Short answer

PDFShift pricing runs from $9 a month for 500 credits (Startup) to $999 a month for 1,000,000 credits (Shift 1M), across nine monthly plans, with yearly billing at ten times the monthly price and overage from $0.04 down to $0.001 a credit. At 10,000 PDFs a month that is $99 on Business against $49 on SitePDF; at 1,000 and 5,000 PDFs PDFShift is cheaper. The usual reasons to look for a PDFShift alternative are records and credit arithmetic. PDFShift renders in Chromium and starts at $9 a month for 500 credits, but it stores nothing by default: once a conversion is delivered there is no lasting copy (an optional parameter parks the PDF on S3 for two days) and no dated record of the source page. It also counts one credit per 5 MB of output, so a 14 MB file costs three credits. SitePDF renders in the same engine and returns the PDF plus a timestamped archive of the page from one call. If you never need provenance, PDFShift is cheaper at low volume and you should stay.

Written and fact checked by the SitePDF team.

PDFShift and SitePDF, compared honestly

PDFShift figures are from pdfshift.io and its published plan listings, read on 16 July 2026 and re-read from PDFShift's public pricing API on 1 October 2026. SitePDF figures are from our pricing page.

	PDFShift	SitePDF
Rendering engine	Chromium	Managed Chromium
Entry price	$9/mo for 500 credits	$49/mo for the in-browser converter, API from $49/mo ($24/mo billed yearly)
Free tier	50 credits a month, no card required	One free PDF in the in-browser converter, then $49/mo; no card to create an API account
How usage is counted	Credits: 1 credit per 5 MB of output, so a heavy file costs several	Per render
Ladder at volume	$24/mo for 2,500 credits; $39/mo for 5,000; $99/mo for 25,000	See the pricing page, API from $49 a month
Stores your output	Not by default. Delivered, then gone; an optional filename parameter parks the PDF on S3 for 2 days, then deletes it	Only when you ask: archive=true keeps a snapshot with retention you control
Timestamped record of the source page	No	Yes. archive=true on any render.
JavaScript heavy pages	Yes	Yes, plus wait_for selector
Status	Shipped, mature, years in production	Self-serve signup, PDF and archive in one call

PDFShift treats storing nothing as a privacy commitment, and for many teams that is exactly right. This comparison is about the teams for whom it is the gap.

PDFShift pricing per PDF at seven monthly volumes

PDFShift publishes its whole ladder through a public pricing API, which is what we read on 1 October 2026. There is a free plan with 50 credits a month, then nine paid plans: Startup $9 for 500 credits, Boost $24 for 2,500, Growth $39 for 5,000, Business $99 for 25,000, Shift 50k $149, Shift 100k $249, Shift 250k $499, Shift 500k $799 and Shift 1M $999. Overage runs from $0.04 a credit on Startup down to $0.03, $0.025, $0.02, $0.015, $0.01, $0.005, $0.003 and $0.001 on the larger plans. Yearly billing is exactly ten times the monthly price, so two months free. Every plan allows files up to 250 MB and a 100 second timeout.

The unit is a credit, and a credit is one document per 5 MB of output, so a 14 MB PDF costs three. The table assumes PDFs under 5 MB and picks the cheapest PDFShift plan for each volume, overage included.

PDFs a month	PDFShift monthly	PDFShift yearly (per month)	SitePDF monthly	SitePDF yearly (per month)	Cheaper
1,000	$24 (Boost, 2,500)	$20	$49	$24	PDFShift
5,000	$39 (Growth)	$32.50	$49	$24	PDFShift monthly, SitePDF yearly
10,000	$99 (Business, 25,000)	$82.50	$49	$24	SitePDF
25,000	$99 (Business)	$82.50	$99 (Growth, 50,000)	$49	Tie monthly, SitePDF yearly
50,000	$149 (Shift 50k)	$124.17	$99	$49	SitePDF
100,000	$249 (Shift 100k)	$207.50	$299 (Scale, 250,000)	$149	PDFShift monthly, SitePDF yearly
250,000	$499 (Shift 250k)	$415.83	$299	$149	SitePDF

The honest reading: under about 5,000 small PDFs a month, PDFShift costs less than we do on monthly billing, and it stays cheaper at 100,000 a month because our next step is the 250,000 render Scale plan. Between 10,000 and 50,000 PDFs, and at 250,000, SitePDF costs less, and on yearly billing we are cheaper from 5,000 PDFs up. The price is not the only difference. PDFShift returns the file and keeps nothing by default, while a SitePDF render called with archive=true comes back with a hosted link and an archive copy kept for 90 days, one year or three years by plan. If you are comparing the wider market at the same volumes, our PDF API pricing comparison lines up the other rendering services, and SitePDF pricing lists what each plan includes.

Where PDFShift is simply the right choice

Credit where it is due. PDFShift's free tier, 50 credits a month with no card, is one of the most usable in the category and makes evaluation painless. Its $9 entry plan undercuts our $49 floor by a wide margin, and the product has been stable for years. The rendering engine is Chromium, the same family we run, so output fidelity on modern CSS and JavaScript pages is comparable.

If your volume is a few hundred small documents a month, nobody ever asks you what a page said last quarter, and you like vendors that keep nothing, buy PDFShift and do not look back. We would tell a friend the same thing.

The credit meter and how to run your real files through the arithmetic

PDFShift counts a credit per 5 MB of generated output. A lean invoice is one credit. An image heavy report, a brand deck, a statement with embedded charts can weigh 10 or 15 MB, which is two or three credits per document. If your documents are consistently small this never matters; if they are large or unpredictable, your effective per document price is a multiple of the sticker one, and the 500 credit floor is not 500 documents.

The test costs nothing: take ten real documents from production, note their sizes, and divide. Then compare against a per render price. We count a render as a render, whatever it weighs.

What "we store nothing" costs you later

PDFShift states plainly that it does not store your documents or requests, and as a privacy posture that is honest and clean. But notice what it means operationally: the moment the response lands, the only copy of that document is wherever your code happened to put it, and there is no record anywhere of what the source page said at render time.

For invoices, statements, disclosures, quotes and confirmations, someone eventually asks. An auditor, a customer disputing a charge, a regulator, your own support team. SitePDF attaches the record to the render: add archive=true and the page is stored as a timestamped snapshot under your account, retrievable by id, with retention you control and delete on request. Leave the flag off and we behave like PDFShift: return the PDF, store nothing.

Migrating is an afternoon, in either direction

Both products take a URL or raw HTML over HTTPS and return a PDF rendered by a Chromium family engine. Your templates do not change; your auth header and endpoint do. The honest consequence is that switching costs are low both ways, so the decision really is about the product shape: credit meter versus per render, stores nothing versus records on demand.

Run the same ten documents through both, compare output, price your real volume, and check the rest of the field in our seven tool comparison, which names the jobs where other vendors beat us too. The PDF generator API page covers the template driven workflow in depth.

The SitePDF call, for comparison: the document and the dated record from one request.

curl https://api.sitepdf.com/v1/render \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SITEPDF_KEY" \
  -d url="https://app.example.com/invoices/8841" \
  -d wait_for="#invoice-total" \
  -d format=Letter \
  -d archive=true

{
  "pdf_url": "https://api.sitepdf.com/v1/documents/doc_77aq2.pdf",
  "archive": {
    "id": "arc_m30zx",
    "captured_at": "2026-07-16T09:02:14Z",
    "retrieve_url": "https://api.sitepdf.com/v1/archives/arc_m30zx"
  }
}

This is the documented API call shape. Full request and response walkthrough.

Questions about this job

How much does PDFShift cost?

PDFShift starts free at 50 credits a month with no card. Paid plans run $9 a month for 500 credits, $24 for 2,500, $39 for 5,000 and $99 for 25,000, with credits counted at one per 5 MB of output. Figures read from pdfshift.io and its published plan listings on 16 July 2026; check their pricing page for current numbers.

Is PDFShift free?

There is a genuinely usable free tier: 50 credits a month, no credit card required. Since a credit covers up to 5 MB of output, that is 50 typical documents a month. It is one of the better free tiers in the category and a fair way to evaluate the rendering quality.

Does PDFShift store my documents?

Not by default. PDFShift states it does not store your documents or requests, which is a real privacy strength; if you pass the optional filename parameter it hosts the PDF on Amazon S3 for two days and then deletes it. The flip side is that there is no copy to retrieve later and no dated record of what the source page said at render time. If you need provenance, that is the gap an alternative fills.

What is the best PDFShift alternative?

It depends on why you are moving. If you need a timestamped record of what you rendered, SitePDF or Urlbox, the only two vendors that keep one. If you need print grade typography, DocRaptor with its PrinceXML engine. If you want the cheapest possible floor, Api2Pdf. Our seven tool comparison covers the whole field with sources.

Does PDFShift use Chromium?

Yes. PDFShift renders with Chromium, so modern CSS, web fonts and JavaScript pages come out the way a browser shows them. SitePDF runs the same engine family, which is why migration between the two is mostly a matter of changing the endpoint and the auth header.

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