CraftMyPDF alternative

They are not the same product, and the price gap is mostly that #

CraftMyPDF is a document builder with an API attached. You lay a template out visually, bind fields to JSON, and call an endpoint with the data. The editor is the product; a large part of what you pay for is a person in your company being able to change an invoice layout without a deploy.

PDFMint is the endpoint without the editor. Your HTML, your CSS, your version control, your review process. Cheaper per document, and useless to somebody who does not want to write HTML. Nothing in the rest of this page changes that trade — it only makes it precise.

The rate card #

At the two prices that match: $29 buys 1,200 documents and 6 templates at CraftMyPDF, and 50,000 documents and any number of templates here; $99 buys 12,000 against 250,000. The template count is the one that catches people out — six is not many once every document type in a business has its own, and it is a hard cap on the plan, not a soft one. A PDFMint template is a named string of HTML you store through the API, so there is no count to run out of.

One more line from their FAQ, because it changes an estimate: “Operations such as adding text or merging PDFs consume 0.5 credit.” A pipeline that generates and then merges is 1.5 credits per output document, not 1.

What is behind a higher plan #

Read from the feature matrix under their plan cards on the same day:

The password line is the one worth pausing on. If your documents are payslips, medical letters or anything else that must be encrypted, CraftMyPDF’s entry price for that is $99 a month. On PDFMint, sending "password" returns the PDF AES-256 encrypted through qpdf, with a separate owner password and print and copy permissions, and it works on the free tier.

The real question: who lays the document out #

Answer this before comparing anything else.

Side by side #

The same job, here #

The closest equivalent to a CraftMyPDF template is a named PDFMint template with placeholders: you store the HTML once and then send only data.

curl -X PUT https://pdf.mintapis.com/v1/templates/invoice \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $PDFMINT_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"html":"<h1>Invoice {{number}}</h1><p>Total: {{amount}}</p>","format":"A4"}'

curl -X POST https://pdf.mintapis.com/v1/pdf \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $PDFMINT_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"template":"invoice","data":{"number":"2026-0042","amount":"1.190,00 EUR"}}' \
  --output invoice.pdf

If a placeholder has no value the call fails with unresolved_placeholders and names the missing field, rather than rendering {{amount}} onto a document you then email to a customer. Set "strict": false if you would rather it rendered anyway.

When to stay on CraftMyPDF #

• Somebody who does not write code owns the layout. This is the whole reason the product exists and it is a good one.
• You need fillable PDF forms, barcodes or QR codes in the designer, or PDF mail merge. They build those; we do not.
• Your volume is low. Under a few hundred documents a month the difference is a cup of coffee.
• You want a vendor with public customer references. They have years of them on their own site. We have none.

What we cannot claim #

No outside customer has paid for PDFMint yet, so there is no case study and no reference to call. There is no visual template editor and none is planned. The free tier is 10 documents a month against CraftMyPDF’s 50. Zapier is not live yet and the Make app is still in review, so if your automation platform is one of those, CraftMyPDF is available there today and we are not. PDFMint runs as a single service in one region with no SLA.

Try it #

The test that settles it is not a feature table: take one real document, build it once in each, and see which of the two working styles your team can live with. Then look at the volume you will actually run.

Get an API key   API reference   Live latency and success rate

Other comparisons #