What a PDF API Credit Buys — and Why Ours Never Expire
If you have compared PDF APIs, you have met the credit. It is the unit every provider bills in — but no two providers make it mean the same thing. Here is exactly what a credit buys on our API, and how the arithmetic works out against the best-known alternative.
What one call costs
Credits are spent per task, per file or per page, depending on how the work scales:
- Per task — merging any number of PDFs costs 5 credits for the whole job.
- Per file — compressing, converting, protecting, watermarking and most other transforms cost 10 credits per file.
- Per page — OCR costs 5 credits per page, and splitting by detected text (smart split) costs 20 per page.
So a 30-page scan you OCR costs 150 credits. A single 40-page PDF you compress costs 10. And a merge of five invoices costs 5, full stop.
What 10,000 credits looks like
Our Starter plan is $30 a month and carries 10,000 credits — roughly 1,000 compressed or converted files, or 2,000 merges, or 2,000 pages of OCR. For a side project that is months of headroom. For a small product it is a real budget you can do arithmetic on.
Subscription or plan?
The best-known PDF API sells its 10,000 credits two ways: $38 per month on a subscription — which resets every month, so unused credits burn — or about $52 for a prepaid pack. Pay monthly and credits expire; prepay and you pay extra. We skipped the trade-off: our plans come monthly or yearly, and unused credits roll over instead of burning — they stay in your balance until you use them.
- Starter — $30/mo for 10,000 credits a month ($3.00 per 1,000 — $2.50 billed yearly)
- Plus — $60/mo for 30,000 credits a month ($2.00 per 1,000 — $1.67 billed yearly)
- Pro — $150/mo for 100,000 credits a month ($1.50 per 1,000 — $1.25 billed yearly)
Same 10,000 credits a month: $30 instead of $38 — or $25 a month billed yearly, comfortably under their $52 prepaid. Cancel any time and your credits stay.
Getting started
Create a free account, pick a plan on the Plans & pricing page, and the moment the payment is verified the Commercial plan unlocks — create your API key in My Account and call your first endpoint. The API page lists every endpoint and the full price list lives with the plans.