Screenshot API pricing compared: the per-render math (2026).

The price of a screenshot API is what one successful render costs at the volume you actually use, not the number on the plan card. That figure moves with four rules the pricing page rarely leads with: what counts as a render, what happens at the plan limit, whether there is a monthly minimum, and how the free tier works.

This is not a "best screenshot API" list. Every vendor below publishes one of those, with itself on top; so do we, in a sense, by existing. What follows is the arithmetic those lists skip. Seven vendors, three monthly volumes, every number read off the public pricing page or FAQ on 2026-09-20, with the source linked. Shotium is in the table in alphabetical order, and the places where it loses are marked as plainly as the places where it wins.

What does a render cost at 2,000, 10,000 and 50,000 a month?

Monthly billing, cheapest plan that covers the volume, price divided by renders actually used. Where a plan includes more than you use, you still pay for the plan; that is the point of the exercise.

• (a) The entry plan covers 1,000 renders, so 2,000 a month means the next plan up.
• (b) The plan includes 100,000 renders. At 50,000 you pay for capacity you don't use; at 100,000 the per-render price halves.
• (c) Shotium has no plan above 10,000. The remaining 40,000 are credit packs at $10 per 1,000.
• (d) thum.io bills per image hit (every time the image URL is loaded), not per unique render. It is a different unit; see below.
• (e) Lo-Fi is scoped to sites you own, with third-party pages limited to thumbnails. For screenshots of pages you don't control, Hi-Fi ($49 for 5,000) is the realistic entry: $0.0245 at 2,000 renders. Scrnify prices in euros; we left them as published rather than pick an exchange rate.

A few things the table makes hard to miss.

The cheapest sticker is not the cheapest at 2,000 renders. ApiFlash at $7 and ScreenshotAPI.net at $9 are the lowest prices on any of these pages. Both cover 1,000 renders. Need 2,000 and you are on $35 and $29, which is $0.0175 and $0.0145 per render, roughly double ScreenshotOne, Scrnify or Shotium at the same volume. Where the rungs sit matters more than where the ladder starts.

At 10,000 the order flips. The same two vendors are now the low end at $0.0029 and $0.0035, under half of everyone else. Shotium's Growth plan is next at $0.0049, then Scrnify, ScreenshotOne and Urlbox. If your volume is steady at 10,000 and you only care about this number, the cheapest option is not us.

At 50,000 it comes down to where each vendor drew its top tier. Vendors with a 100,000 plan are cheap per render but you buy twice what you use. ScreenshotOne's Scale plan is sized for exactly this volume and lands at $0.0052. Shotium has nothing above 10,000, so the remainder is credit packs at $0.010 and the blended price is $0.0090, second most expensive on the list. Urlbox's Business tier is priced for a 99.95% SLA and 1,000 requests a minute, not for cost per render, and reads accordingly.

What counts as a render?

The unit under the price is not the same unit everywhere. We counted three.

A successful, unique render, with cache hits free. This is the norm, and it is what Shotium does too. ApiFlash, ScreenshotAPI.net, Urlbox, Scrnify and Shotium bill only when a new image is produced; repeat requests for the same parameters within the cache window cost nothing. ScreenshotOne does the same, with a footnote worth reading: it caches through a CDN, and a cache miss there may trigger a re-render that counts. The window is the number to compare. Shotium's is 24 hours, which is also the max-age on its signed URLs; a card that stays embedded on a busy page costs one render per day it is actively fetched, and nothing for the thousand fetches in between. Until 2026-09-20 Shotium billed requests answered from its origin cache and only waived the CDN edge; that rule is gone, and the billing semantics now say so.

Time and size multipliers. Urlbox charges one render per 30 seconds of render time and one per 5 MB of output, with GPU rendering at double. A slow page that takes 70 seconds is three renders. On most pages this never triggers; on heavy ones it changes the arithmetic more than the plan price does.

Per hit. thum.io bills every load of the image URL. That is the product: an image CDN with a browser behind it, addressed by URL from an <img> tag. A card shared a thousand times is a thousand hits, about ten cents on the Better plan, where every per-render vendor above bills once and lets a cache serve the rest. Cheap at low traffic, a different shape entirely at high traffic.

What happens when you hit the limit?

Every vendor does one of four things when you cross the line, and each one hurts somewhere different.

Hard stop. ApiFlash returns HTTP 402. Shotium returns HTTP 429 with a quota_exceeded problem type. ScreenshotAPI.net's help centre says a 403 screenshot_limit_reached in one article and "overages are charged according to your plan" in another; ask them which applies before you depend on either. The hard stop hurts in the obvious place: on the 28th your renders start failing and keep failing until someone upgrades or tops up. Shotium's mitigation is credit packs that never expire, sitting under the plan as a buffer, and a 429 body that says how to top up.

Automatic upgrade. Urlbox moves you to the next tier when you cross the quota. Nothing fails. The invoice does: a $49 month turns into a $99 month without anyone deciding it should.

Metered overage. ScreenshotOne bills each extra render at $0.009, $0.006 or $0.004 depending on plan. Predictable per unit, unbounded in total, and the most common model in usage-priced infrastructure.

Pay as you go. Scrnify and thum.io have no plan to exceed. There is no cliff and no cap; alarms are your job.

Which is right depends on which conversation you would rather have: explaining a failed render, or explaining a larger bill. We chose the first, deliberately, and wrote it into the Terms: we never auto-charge for overage.

Is the free tier free every month?

The word covers three different arrangements.

Recurring monthly. ScreenshotOne and ApiFlash reset 100 free screenshots every month. thum.io resets 1,000 hits. If you have a small steady workload, these cost nothing, indefinitely.

Trial. Urlbox has no free plan and says why on its pricing page (it serves revenue-generating businesses and prices for sustainability); you get 7 days. ScreenshotAPI.net gives 100 screenshots in a 7-day trial.

One-time. Shotium grants 100 credits at sign-up, no card, and they never expire. Scrnify makes your first 100 lifetime units free, then adds 100 per billing period once billing is active.

Our reason for one-time rather than monthly: the output of this API is a public URL that ends up in <head>. A recurring free allowance on that is a standing offer to run production social cards for free indefinitely, and the cost of that lands on paying customers. One hundred credits is enough to evaluate the rendering, the templates and the signed-URL flow properly; it is not enough to run a site on. If a recurring free allowance is what you need, ScreenshotOne and ApiFlash are the honest recommendation.

Where does Shotium sit, honestly?

• Cheapest subscription per render at 2,000 and at 10,000 among the real-browser, success-billed subscriptions it most resembles (ScreenshotOne, Urlbox). Undercut at 10,000 by ApiFlash and ScreenshotAPI.net.
• No plan above 10,000. Credit packs at $0.010 make 50,000 a month cost $449. If that is your volume today, ScreenshotOne Scale or either 100,000 plan is cheaper, and we would rather say so than have you find out. A larger tier appears when there is demand for one; tell us.
• No refunds on delivered renders. Renders are digital and immediate, and the Terms say so, with statutory consumer rights preserved. ScreenshotOne and Urlbox both offer 30-day money back; Urlbox adds a $100 guarantee on your first 10,000. What we offer instead is the hard 429: you are never billed for more than you explicitly bought, and cancelling keeps the period you paid for.
• Included, and not sold by anyone else here: five typed OG image templates and HMAC-signed URLs that regenerate when the parameters change, with framework guides for wiring them in. If your use case is social cards for pages that change, that is the column the table doesn't have.

How should you pick?

• Under 1,000 renders a month, pages that rarely change: take any monthly free tier, or Shotium's 100 credits, render once, download, and you may never pay anyone. We mean that; it is the right answer for a personal blog.
• 2,000 to 10,000 a month, steady: compare Shotium Starter and Growth, ScreenshotOne Basic and Growth, and Scrnify. Decide on the cache window (how often do you re-request the same URL, and does it fall inside it?) and on cliff versus invoice at the limit, not on the sticker.
• Bursty or unpredictable: Scrnify's pay-as-you-go, or Shotium credit packs that never expire, so an idle month costs nothing extra.
• 50,000 and up: ScreenshotOne Scale, ApiFlash Large or ScreenshotAPI.net Business on price; Urlbox Business if you are buying the SLA and the request rate rather than the renders.
• Public embeds with large impression counts: any per-render vendor with a cache in front, and not a per-hit one. The thousandth share of a card should cost nothing.

If the question is really "should I run headless Chrome myself instead", that is a different piece of arithmetic, and the answer depends on your hourly rate more than on any number above.

The plans compared here are on pricing, and the 100 free credits are on your account the moment you sign in with GitHub or Google. No card, and the first thing to check is whether the cache window fits your traffic.

Every price and rule above was read from the vendor's public pricing page or help centre on 2026-09-20, linked in the table. Pricing pages change; if yours has and we are now wrong about it, email [email protected] and we will correct it.