PDFMonkey alternative

The rate card #

The line that repays a second look is Pro+ at €60 for 5,000 documents: it costs four times Pro for two thirds more volume, because what you are actually buying at that step is unlimited retention and collaborators, not throughput. PDFMint’s equivalent volume, 5,000 documents, is the $9 plan — and retention is not a feature there because there is nothing stored to retain.

Retention is the axis that decides this #

PDFMonkey generates a document, stores it, and gives you a URL. That is a real convenience: the file has a home, a dashboard shows you every document, and share links exist on the higher plans. It also means the plan’s retention window is a deadline. On Starter you have one day to fetch and file the PDF somewhere of your own; on Pro, seven. Miss it — a downstream job fails overnight, an S3 upload silently 403s — and the document is gone and has to be regenerated, which costs another credit.

PDFMint has no such window because it has no storage. POST /v1/pdf returns the PDF bytes in the response body; where they go next is your decision, made in your code, at the moment you already have them. If you do want a URL, "output": "link" gives you a hosted one — opt-in, per request, rather than the default.

Which of those is better depends entirely on whether you already have somewhere to put files. If you do not, PDFMonkey’s storage is doing real work for you and this section is an argument in their favour.

Euros, excluding VAT #

PDFMonkey’s page states that the prices shown exclude VAT and taxes. For a business with a valid VAT ID inside the EU that is usually a wash; for a private buyer or a non-registered business it is not, and €15 becomes €17.85 at 19%. PDFMint prices are in US dollars and checkout runs on Stripe, where a VAT ID can be added to the invoice if you need one. Neither approach is better — but compare like with like when you put the two columns side by side.

Stored document versus bytes back #

For a workflow tool the synchronous shape is usually simpler: one node, binary out, next node attaches it to an email. For a high-volume batch the asynchronous shape is usually kinder to your own timeouts. Both products can do both; the difference is which one is the default and therefore which one is less code.

Side by side #

The same job, here #

curl -X PUT https://pdf.mintapis.com/v1/templates/receipt \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $PDFMINT_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"html":"<h1>Receipt {{number}}</h1><p>{{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":"receipt","data":{"number":"2026-0042","amount":"1.190,00 EUR"}}' \
  --output receipt.pdf

No document ID, no polling, no retention clock. If you would rather have a URL after all, add "output": "link" and you get one back instead of the bytes.

When to stay on PDFMonkey #

• You want the documents stored for you. If you have nowhere to put files, their storage plus share links is doing work you would otherwise build.
• A non-developer edits the templates. Their dashboard editor exists; ours does not.
• You are under 300 documents a month. €5 is a good price and switching would save you a few euros a year.
• You want an established vendor. They have one; we do not.

What we cannot claim #

No outside customer has paid for PDFMint yet — no case study, no reference. There is no dashboard listing your past documents and no visual template editor, and neither is planned. The free tier is 10 a month against PDFMonkey’s 20. PDFMint runs as a single service in one region with no SLA; the uptime figure on the status page resets on every deploy and says so.

Try it #

Answer one question first: do you need the PDF to have a home, or do you already have one? That decides this comparison more than any per-document price does.

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Other comparisons #