Screenshot API cost calculator

How the pricing calculator works

Move the slider to your monthly screenshot volume. The calculator finds the cheapest option that covers it — either a plan whose quota is big enough, or a smaller plan plus overage, whichever comes out lower. Prices update live for all four providers, so you're comparing actual monthly costs at your actual volume without opening four browser tabs.

The "per 1,000" column is the one worth watching. A $9 entry plan looks attractive until you run the numbers: if your volume lands you on a $79 tier, you're paying $7.90 per 1,000 captures — while another provider covers the same volume for $2.90. That gap compounds fast at scale.

Why the sticker price isn't what you'll pay

Every screenshot API shows three plan cards on their pricing page. What those cards don't show clearly is the gap between the headline price and your actual monthly bill once you factor in tier jumps, locked features, and overage rates.

The tier gap problem

Screenshot API plans don't scale smoothly. They jump from 2,000 to 10,000 to 50,000. If you use 4,200 screenshots a month at ScreenshotOne, you have to buy the 10,000-credit Growth plan ($79) and leave 5,800 credits sitting unused. You're paying for capacity you'll never touch. The calculator shows this explicitly — "plan you'd need" tells you which tier you land on, not just the final price.

Feature gating

ScreenshotOne's Basic plan starts at $17/month. But geo-targeting, scrolling video captures, and retina screenshots are locked to the Growth plan at $79/month. If your project needs any of those, your real entry price is $79 — four and a half times the advertised number. The calculator shows base plan costs only; always check the feature matrix before integrating.

ScreenshotRun doesn't gate features by plan. Every tier — including Starter at $9 — includes full-page capture, PDF export, dark mode, geo-targeting, retina, ad blocking, CSS injection, and all other parameters. The plan tier changes your quota and overage rate. Nothing else.

Overage billing

Some providers cut you off when you hit your monthly limit. Others keep serving requests and charge per extra screenshot, often at 2–3× the in-plan rate. At ScreenshotOne, Growth plan overage runs $0.006 per screenshot — that's $6 per 1,000 extra, compared to $3.40 per 1,000 on the plan itself. A retry loop bug or a traffic spike can generate a surprise bill before anyone notices. The calculator picks the cheaper option between bumping to the next plan and staying put with overage.

What counts as one screenshot

This catches almost every developer integrating a screenshot API for the first time. The four providers count credits differently, and it's not always obvious from the pricing page.

ScreenshotRun counts only successful captures. Failed requests, timeouts, and cached responses don't consume credits. ScreenshotOne works similarly — cached screenshots don't count against your quota, and failed requests are free. The quota is for fresh renders only.

Microlink counts every API request, including metadata and OG tag fetches that aren't screenshot captures. If you're using Microlink for both metadata extraction and screenshots in the same project, your effective screenshot cost is higher than the per-screenshot price suggests. That's why the "per 1,000" number in the calculator looks different from a straight $49 ÷ 46,000 calculation. ScreenshotAPI.net counts all successful API calls — cached responses included.

One thing the calculator doesn't account for: mixed request types. If you're hitting multiple endpoints within the same API (screenshots plus metadata plus PDF conversions), the credit math will be off. The numbers shown assume screenshot-only requests at whatever volume you've set.

How to estimate your monthly volume

If you're evaluating APIs before building, get a rough volume estimate first. It saves a lot of plan-switching. Here are the common patterns and what they typically produce:

Link preview cards for a SaaS app run roughly equal to the number of new URLs your users paste per month. An app with 500 active users each adding 5 new links comes to around 2,500 screenshots per month. OG image generation at build time is simpler — one capture per published page. A site pushing 30 new pages a month with occasional republishing lands somewhere between 50 and 200 per month.

Website monitoring follows a formula: pages × devices × frequency. Checking 20 pages on desktop and mobile every hour gives you 20 × 2 × 24 × 30 = 28,800 per month. Visual regression testing in CI runs test count × builds per day × working days — fifty test cases, ten builds daily, twenty working days is 10,000 per month. Bulk archiving or compliance capture is a direct count: 300 pages per day works out to 9,000 per month.

Add 20% to your estimate. Development testing, retries, and unexpected traffic are real, and it's cheaper to start on a slightly larger plan than to watch overage stack up at the end of the month.

ScreenshotRun pricing at each tier

Since this is our calculator, being transparent about our own numbers is the least we can do. Here's what each plan includes, without asterisks:

All features are available on every plan. Unused credits reset monthly — they don't carry over. Failed captures and cached responses don't consume your quota. There's no annual billing option right now; the monthly price is the price.

At very high volumes (250,000+ per month), the calculator will show whether ScreenshotRun overage on the Business plan or a competitor's plan covers your volume cheaper. We don't hide that — the point is to give you an honest number so you can make the right call. (If you're at that scale, reach out directly — custom pricing makes sense at those volumes.)

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