Free HTML to PDF APIs, honestly compared

The free tiers

Two rows need a footnote. DocRaptor's 5 documents are real, and its plan pairs them with unlimited watermarked test documents, fine for building against but stamped so they cannot ship, and no overage is allowed on the real ones. ConvertAPI's 250 conversions are a one-time signup grant rather than a monthly tier, which the resets column says plainly.

What free tiers do not advertise

The volume number is the headline; the fine print decides whether a tier survives contact with a real workload. Four failure modes recur across this field, and none of them show up in the number a landing page leads with.

• Timeouts: PDFShift's free tier renders against a 30-second clock, so one slow page burns quota without producing a file. webcapture vs PDFShift prices the paid tiers against ours.
• Concurrency: ConvertAPI gates parallel renders at 1, 2, 3, or 4 by plan, with Enterprise unlimited, so a single slow document can queue work behind it.
• Non-commercial clauses: pdflayer's free tier is licensed for non-commercial use only, which quietly disqualifies it from any revenue product.
• Asset blocks: PDFMonkey's free tier refuses external images, fonts, CSS and JS, so anything beyond inline-styled text renders incomplete.

Every row above prints its catch at the same size as its volume, because on a free tier the catch is usually the term that applies first.

About ours

webcapture is the last row, and the bias is disclosed in the row itself. The free tier is 50 documents a month, it is the full API rather than a feature-limited one, commercial use is allowed, and when you exceed it you get a 429 rather than a bill: the quota blocks until the month rolls over and no invoice follows. Where we lose on this table it says so: PDFEndpoint's 100 a month that never expires is the volume floor, and if you can run a container, self-hosting beats every free tier on price. Our plans are published on our pricing page.

Going deeper: the webcapture product page keeps engine, pricing, and a curl quick start on one page, the best-of comparison prices the paid field per document, the formatting guide explains why conversions break and how browser rendering keeps layout intact, and the alternatives hub maps the archived tool flag by flag. When the decision is capability rather than volume, the capability matrix reads the same eight vendors across fourteen rows, our own gaps printed with the vendor to choose instead. If hosted prices brought you here, the open-source comparison is the self-hosted side of the same table.

Method

Checked 2026-09-11 against each vendor's own pricing page, quoting volume, reset rule, and catch as listed. Source URLs and ConvertAPI's concurrency note checked 2026-10-24. Questions or corrections: hello@webcapture.io.