Last updated September 2026. ConvertAPI is priced per conversion, not per page and not per seat. Four self-serve plans run from $35 a month for 1,000 conversions to $350 a month for 50,000, with an Enterprise tier quoted by sales. Signing up gets you 250 conversions free. The figures below were read from ConvertAPI's own pricing page in September 2026 and cross-checked against its US directory listing.
If you are costing a PDF to Excel pipeline rather than a general file converter, skip to the section on how a conversion is counted. That is the number that decides your bill, and it is the one ConvertAPI does not put on the pricing page.
How much does ConvertAPI cost?
ConvertAPI costs $35 a month on the Developer plan, $95 on Startup, $175 on Growth and $350 on Business, each including a fixed monthly quota of conversions. Enterprise pricing is quoted. Annual billing is offered at a discount, and the annual plan pools the whole year's quota rather than resetting each month.
| Plan | Monthly price | Conversions a month | Cost per conversion | Max file size | Concurrent conversions | Team members |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| Free | $0 | 250 on signup | n/a | n/a | n/a | 1 |
| Developer | $35 | 1,000 | $0.035 | 200 MB | 1 | 1 |
| Startup | $95 | 5,000 | $0.019 | 300 MB | 2 | 3 |
| Growth | $175 | 15,000 | $0.0117 | 500 MB | 3 | 5 |
| Business | $350 | 50,000 | $0.007 | 1 GB | 4 | Unlimited |
| Enterprise | Quoted | 100,000+ | Negotiated | 2 GB | Unlimited | Unlimited |
The annual equivalents on the same cards are 12,000, 60,000, 180,000 and 600,000 conversions, which is exactly twelve months of each monthly quota. Verify the annual dollar figure at checkout rather than assuming a flat discount off the monthly price, because the two ladders did not line up to a single clean percentage when we read them.
What is the cost per conversion on each ConvertAPI plan?
Dividing each plan's price by its included quota gives $0.035 on Developer, $0.019 on Startup, $0.0117 on Growth and $0.007 on Business. The entry plan is five times more expensive per conversion than the top self-serve plan. Developer to Business is fifty times the volume for ten times the price, so every step up the ladder buys a materially better unit rate.
That spread matters more than it looks. If you are running 4,000 conversions a month you will be tempted to sit on Developer and pay overage rather than move to Startup at $95. Do the arithmetic first: 4,000 conversions at the Startup rate is $76 of value inside a $95 plan, while the same volume metered above a 1,000 conversion allowance is priced at whatever the overage rate turns out to be, and overage rates are almost never cheaper than the plan they sit above.
How does ConvertAPI count a conversion?
The meter is the conversion, which is a request that turns an input file into an output file. ConvertAPI's pricing page states the quota in conversions and does not publish a rule for how page count affects that count, which is a real gap if your documents are long. A 300 page financial report and a one page receipt are described the same way on the pricing page.
There is an observable wrinkle worth raising with their sales team in writing before you commit. Some endpoints emit one output file per page: converting a 30 page PDF to JPG produces 30 images. Whether that is billed as one conversion or thirty changes a large migration's cost by an order of magnitude, and it is not something to discover in month two. Ask, and get the answer in the contract.
Three billing models, three different victims
Document conversion vendors meter in one of three ways, and each punishes a different shape of workload. It is worth knowing which one you are.
| Billing unit | Who it suits | Who it punishes | Example |
|---|---|---|---|
| Per page | Many short documents | Long reports and full year statements | Per-page cloud OCR APIs |
| Per document or credit | Long documents | High volumes of one and two page files | Template parsers sold in credits |
| Per conversion request | Few large files | Chatty pipelines making many small calls | ConvertAPI |
ConvertAPI sits in the third row. If your pipeline splits a document, converts each piece and merges the result, you have just paid for three conversions where a single call would have cost one. Design the integration around the meter. We worked the same arithmetic out for credit-based pricing in our breakdown of Docparser pricing, and for the per-page model in intelligent document processing software pricing.
What does the $35 ConvertAPI plan actually get you?
More than the price suggests on capability and considerably less than most buyers assume on operations. Two published limits on the Developer plan deserve to be read before you build on it.
One concurrent conversion. Developer allows a single conversion in flight at a time. That is not a throughput cap you can engineer around with more workers, because the second request waits for the first. A backfill of 1,000 documents runs strictly end to end. Startup gives you two lanes, Growth three, Business four, and only Enterprise is unlimited. For a nightly batch this is usually the constraint that forces the upgrade, not the quota.
A support first response target of under seven days. ConvertAPI publishes its response times per plan, and Developer's is under seven days with an estimated fourteen days to resolve a ticket. Startup is under 72 hours, Growth under 48, Business under 24. If a production PDF import breaks on a Friday on the $35 plan, the published expectation is that you hear back the following week. That is a reasonable trade at that price, but it should be a decision rather than a surprise.
| Plan | First response | Ticket resolution | Support channels | Log retention |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Developer | Under 7 days | 14 days | Self-guided onboarding | 2 months |
| Startup | Under 72 hours | 7 days | 2 months | |
| Growth | Under 48 hours | 4 days | Email, live chat | 2 months |
| Business | Under 24 hours | 2 days | Email, chat, video call | 2 months |
| Enterprise | Under 24 hours | 2 days | 24/7/365 emergency | 12 months |
What SLA does ConvertAPI offer?
Every plan carries a standard 99.5% SLA, and the guaranteed 99.95% SLA with a service credit policy is Enterprise only. The gap is bigger than the decimal makes it look: 99.5% allows roughly 3.6 hours of downtime a month, while 99.95% allows about 22 minutes. Neither is unusual for a file conversion API at these prices, but if a document import is on a customer-facing path you should assume the 3.6 hour figure and plan for it.
Practically, that means owning your own signal. Do not learn that the conversion endpoint is down from a support ticket. Put a check on the endpoint you actually call, with a real file and an assertion on the response, so that a failing conversion wakes you before it wakes a customer, and queue the work so a five minute outage produces a retry rather than a lost document.
Is ConvertAPI's free tier enough to evaluate it?
Two hundred and fifty conversions on signup is enough to test correctness and nowhere near enough to test throughput. That is the right way round for an evaluation. Spend them on your ugliest real documents rather than a clean sample: the scanned invoice, the 200 page statement, the report with merged header cells. Correctness on hard files is what you are buying, and it is the thing a pricing table cannot tell you.
What 250 conversions cannot show you is the concurrency ceiling or the support response, both of which only bite in production. If those matter, price the plan you would actually run on, not the one you would start on.
Is ConvertAPI worth it for PDF to Excel?
It depends on whether file conversion is your problem or table extraction is. ConvertAPI is a broad file conversion platform covering a long list of formats, and its per-conversion pricing is competitive at volume. What a general converter is not built to do is reason about table geometry: merged cells, repeating header rows, wrapped descriptions that split one line item across three rows, and figures that need to arrive as numbers rather than text.
If the destination is a spreadsheet somebody has to reconcile, the accuracy of the table structure is worth more than the price per call. That is the case our own PDF to Excel API is built for, on a flat plan rather than a meter, and the wider comparison of what conversion costs across sixteen products sits on our pricing page. For the API-side alternatives priced by transaction, we broke down Adobe PDF Services API pricing, where the counting rules turn out to differ by a factor of ten between endpoints.
How does ConvertAPI handle security and compliance?
ConvertAPI publishes GDPR and ISO 27001 compliance, encrypted transfer and storage, and displays HIPAA and SOC 2 compliance badges. A signed DPA and NDA are available from the Startup plan upward, a signed BAA is available when required, and the company has been trading since 2011. Conversion logs and statistics are retained for two months on self-serve plans and twelve on Enterprise.
The retention figure is the one to note if you work in a regulated context. Two months of logs is a short audit trail. If you need to prove a year from now which documents were processed and when, keep that record on your own side rather than relying on the vendor's console.
Which ConvertAPI plan should you choose?
Match the plan to the constraint that will actually bind, which is rarely the quota.
- Prototyping or a low volume internal tool: Developer at $35. Accept that support is a week away and that everything runs one at a time.
- A shipped feature with real users: Startup at $95 at minimum, mostly to get a 72 hour response and a second concurrent lane.
- Nightly batches or a migration: Growth at $175 or Business at $350, chosen on concurrency rather than volume. Three lanes against one is a three times shorter batch window.
- Regulated or customer-facing: Enterprise, because that is the only tier with the 99.95% guarantee and twelve month log retention.
One last piece of arithmetic that catches teams out. If you are converting many documents in a recurring monthly process, compare the metered total against a flat plan before you commit to either. At 5,000 conversions a month the meter costs $95; at 500 it costs $35 for an allowance you use a fifth of. Metered pricing rewards steady high volume and quietly penalizes lumpy low volume, which is exactly the shape most finance and operations workloads have. If your volume is spiky, the annual plan's pooled quota is the feature to ask about, and a flat plan is worth pricing alongside it. Our own arithmetic across the category is in what PDF to Excel conversion costs per page, and if you are converting stacks of documents on a schedule rather than one at a time, batch conversion is usually the cheaper shape.
Prices and limits here were read from ConvertAPI's published pricing page in September 2026 and cross-checked against its US directory listing. Vendors change pricing without notice, so confirm the current figures before you buy. Nothing here is affiliated with or endorsed by ConvertAPI.