SelectPdf, HiQPdf and EvoPdf Pricing: .NET HTML to PDF License Costs by Team Size

The quickest way to see why a feature comparison will mislead you is to price one team at all three vendors. Here are five common shapes, each priced at the lowest tier that legally covers it, on list prices read 15 September 2026.

Look at rows B and C together, because they are the whole story. A single developer shipping one app that autoscales across a few instances pays $245 at HiQPdf and $1,200 at EvoPdf, a 4.9x gap, because EvoPdf states plainly that "As soon as the same application runs on more than one server or instance (behind a load balancer, in a container cluster, with autoscaling) you need a Company License." Flip the shape to eight developers on one app on one server and the order reverses: EvoPdf is $450, HiQPdf is $1,095 and SelectPdf is $1,199, because only EvoPdf ignores headcount.

SelectPdf sits in the middle of almost every row because it is the only vendor that counts both. It is rarely the cheapest and rarely the most expensive, and its machine caps (1, 10 and 100) are the thing to watch. Row E is where that bites: 150 container instances blow through the 100 machine Enterprise cap and push you to Enterprise OEM at $1,599, a tier sold for redistribution, simply to lift the ceiling.

One honest caveat on row B. Only EvoPdf spells out how autoscaled instances are counted. HiQPdf does not count machines at all, but SelectPdf defines a deployment machine as a production server without saying how a short lived container instance counts. If you autoscale on SelectPdf, get the answer in writing before you buy, and keep the email with the license key.

A perpetual license keeps working forever, but only on the version you bought. Once you need a .NET upgrade, a Chromium security fix or a bug fix, you need maintenance, and maintenance is priced very differently at each vendor. Here is the same five scenarios over three years: the license plus two on time annual renewals.

HiQPdf renews at exactly half the license price on every tier. EvoPdf renews at 56 percent for Deployment and a lower 46 percent for Company. SelectPdf renews at 60 to 67 percent, and the share rises as the tier gets bigger: Single Developer renews at $299 on a $499 license, Enterprise at $799 on $1,199. Over three years an Enterprise buyer pays $1,598 in renewals against a $1,199 license, so maintenance, not the license, is the larger cost.

The late renewal terms deserve a calendar reminder more than they deserve a spreadsheet. All three converge on roughly 80 percent of a new license if you miss the window: HiQPdf states 80 percent after a 30 day grace period, EvoPdf charges 20 percent off full price after 15 days, and SelectPdf lists $399 against a $499 license. EvoPdf adds a harder edge: "More than a year after expiration, maintenance can no longer be renewed; a new license is required to receive current versions."

This is the line item that almost never appears in a license comparison, and on Azure it is usually bigger than the license itself. An HTML to PDF library runs a real browser engine inside your process, so it needs dedicated CPU and memory, and none of the three is at home on the cheapest hosting.

SelectPdf is Windows only. Its own Azure Functions guide says the "hosting plan should be Premium or App Service Plan, starting with Standard. SelectPdf will not work with an Azure Consumption Plan nor with a Free or Shared App Service Plan", and that on Azure it "will use a restricted rendering engine". EvoPdf says the Consumption plan "does not have the resources for the rendering engine" and recommends "B1 for low volume, B2 for development, P1v3 or higher for production". HiQPdf Next states it runs in App Service and Functions on Windows and Linux and does not publish a minimum plan on its product page.

Prices are pay as you go list rates from the Azure retail price list for East US, read 15 September 2026. The arithmetic is blunt: one P1v3 Windows instance, the production tier EvoPdf recommends, costs $2,759.40 a year, which is 2.3 times its $1,200 Company license. Two instances for redundancy cost $5,518.80 a year, more than three times the most expensive license on this page. If you already run Windows servers with spare capacity, this cost is sunk and a license is good value. If you were planning to run PDF generation on a Consumption plan that scales to zero, none of these libraries fits that plan.

SelectPdf is unusual in selling both a library and a hosted REST API on the same engine, and its own site points Linux, macOS and non .NET users to the API. The Online API ladder, read 15 September 2026, is $19 a month for 2,000 conversions (2 concurrent), $29 for 5,000 (4), $59 for 20,000 (8), $119 for 50,000 (8), $229 for 100,000 (16) and $449 for unlimited conversions (16). Annual billing is exactly ten months of the monthly price.

That ladder makes a useful sanity check on the license. At low volume the vendor own API is cheaper than its own library: the $19 Entry plan billed annually is $190 a year, so three years cost $570 against $1,097 for a Single Developer license with two renewals, before you pay for a single hour of Windows hosting. The library only wins once volume is high enough that per conversion pricing hurts, or when the HTML cannot leave your network at all.

For comparison, our own API tiers on the Sitepdf pricing page are $29 a month for 10,000 renders, $99 for 50,000 and $299 for 250,000, and yearly billing costs the same as six months. Per 1,000 renders that is $2.90, $1.98 and $1.20, against SelectPdf at $2.95 on the 20,000 plan and $2.29 on the 100,000 plan. Above 250,000 renders a month the SelectPdf unlimited plan at $449 is the only flat priced option of the two, and we say so. What our tiers add is a timestamped archive of every rendered source, kept 90 days to 3 years depending on tier.

Buy a library license when the HTML genuinely cannot leave your infrastructure, when you are already paying for Windows or Linux servers that have headroom, or when you ship software to customers who install it on their own machines. In that last case check redistribution rights before price: SelectPdf sells OEM tiers for it, EvoPdf includes it in Company but not Deployment, and HiQPdf describes every tier as free of "run time or deployment costs", so confirm redistribution in its license agreement.

Pick by team shape, not by feature list. Small team, many servers or autoscaling: HiQPdf. Big team, one app on one box: EvoPdf Deployment. A Windows shop that wants one vendor for HTML conversion plus merge, split and forms, with an escape hatch to a hosted API later: SelectPdf. Anyone deploying to Linux containers should rule out SelectPdf and HiQPdf Classic immediately, since both are Windows bound, and read our guide to running SelectPdf workloads on Linux and Docker before migrating.

Skip the license when volume is modest, when your hosting is serverless or Linux and you do not want Chromium system packages in your image, or when you need to prove later what a document looked like when it was produced. That is the job a rendering API does in one HTTP call. You can test it on your own HTML with the converter at the top of this page, and our C# PDF library comparison covers the free and open source .NET options if budget is the constraint.