I built an HTML-to-PDF API in 6 weeks — here's what I learned

Abdul Jabeer Shaik — Tue, 12 May 2026 01:48:05 +0000

I got frustrated with PDF APIs that make you enter a credit card
before you can test anything. So I built my own.

It's called pdfkitt.dev — POST your HTML, get back a PDF.
1,000 free PDFs/month, no credit card required.

How it works

curl -X POST https://api.pdfkitt.dev/v1/pdf \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer pdfk_live_..." \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"html": "<h1>Hello</h1>"}' \
  --output result.pdf

That's it. No SDK required.

Tech decisions worth sharing

Playwright over Puppeteer — more stable browser pool
management, better CSS support for print layouts.

JavaScript disabled by design — security tradeoff. Works
perfectly for server-rendered HTML like invoices, reports, and
bank statements. Notion-style JS-heavy pages don't work —
and that's documented upfront.

Raw SQL over an ORM — kept it simple. Postgres on Railway,
bcrypt-hashed API keys, that's it.

Fastify over Express — faster, TypeScript-first, schema
validation built in.

The free tier decision

1,000 PDFs/month free was a deliberate choice. Most PDF APIs
give you 50-100 to "test" which isn't enough to actually
integrate and ship. I wanted developers to be able to go
from zero to production without ever thinking about paying.

What's working so far

Invoices, reports, bank statements render accurately
PowerShell integration works (had to document JSON handling explicitly — Windows devs have different defaults)
CSS print layouts, tables, page breaks all handled

What I cut from v1

SDKs, URL conversion, templates, webhooks, custom fonts,
screenshots, merge/split, OCR. All of it. Shipping one thing
well beats shipping ten things poorly.