InkPDF vs PDFShift: an honest comparison

Pricing and features checked July 2026. Their pricing page is the source of truth.

PDFShift is a solid, fast, Chromium-based conversion API — technically the closest competitor to InkPDF, since both render with Chrome's engine. The differences are the pricing model and what happens before the HTML: PDFShift converts documents you've already built; InkPDF will also build them from JSON templates or Markdown.

The pricing model difference

PDFShift bills in credits based on output file size — each 5 MB of PDF consumes an extra credit. Image-heavy invoices, brochures, or long reports can quietly cost 2–3 credits each, which makes monthly costs hard to predict. InkPDF bills flat documents per month: a 40-page image-heavy report counts exactly the same as a one-page receipt.

Feature comparison

Switching is one field rename

PDFShift call:

POST https://api.pdfshift.io/v3/convert/pdf
Authorization: Basic api:sk_…
{ "source": "<h1>Hi</h1>" }

InkPDF call:

POST https://inkpdf.dev/v1/pdf
Authorization: Bearer ink_live_…
{ "html": "<h1>Hi</h1>" }

source → html (or url), and the layout options map one-to-one — see the API reference.

Choose PDFShift if…

Your PDFs are consistently tiny (credits then beat flat pricing at low volume — their $9 tier is genuinely cheap for ~500 small files), or you need their raw-image and long-lived S3 export options.

Choose InkPDF if…

You want costs that don't depend on how many screenshots your reports embed, you'd rather send JSON than build invoice HTML, or you generate mixed document types (invoices + reports + certificates) and want one API for all of them.