Home › Blog › Templates in, documents out. Meet ShipPDF

You need a PDF: a real invoice, contract, or shipping label that looks right the moment someone opens it. Not a web page, not an HTML string. So you spin up a headless browser, wire in a template, lose an afternoon to page breaks, and end up owning a small rendering service that does exactly one job and finds new ways to break.

ShipPDF is that service, without the ownership. Design a template once in the visual editor, send it data, get a PDF back. The template doesn’t care whether the data came from your backend, a spreadsheet, or an AI assistant.

Connect it to your AI assistant

ShipPDF speaks MCP, so an assistant can run the whole job (build the template, publish it, generate the document) with whichever model you already have open: Claude, ChatGPT, Gemini, or Copilot. You give it a scoped key, and it can do what the key allows and nothing more. Handing a task to an agent shouldn’t mean handing over your account.

Full walkthrough: Connect ShipPDF to your AI assistant.

Or call the API

Prefer to stay in code? It’s one request:

curl -X POST https://app.shippdf.com/api/v1/documents \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer $SHIPPDF_TOKEN" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{ "template_id": "tpl_8f...", "data": { "number": "INV-1042" } }'
# → 202 { "id": "doc_a3...", "status": "queued" }

What’s actually different

• The template is the source of truth. Change it once and every document after reflects it. No layout copy-pasted across three services.
• Same input, same PDF. Regenerate last quarter’s invoice and you get the document you sent. Useful the day someone asks you to prove it.
• Nothing to babysit. No Chromium to patch, no out-of-memory surprises at 2 a.m. A document is a request and a response.
• Not just for developers. Fire the same template from Zapier, Make, n8n, Airtable, or Google Sheets.

If you’re maintaining PDF code you’d rather delete, sign up and tell us what you’re generating.

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