Every business generates invoices. Most engineering teams end up building invoice PDF generation from scratch — stitching together HTML strings, fighting with CSS print styles, and debugging why the layout breaks when a client name is too long.

There’s a better way. With AgentPDF, you don’t need a designer, and you don’t need to write a custom renderer. You can build the invoice template yourself in our visual editor, or — here’s what makes AgentPDF different — let your AI agent design the template for you using our simple layout rendering engine. Either way, the output is deterministic: same data in, same PDF out, every time.

Why Invoice PDF Generation Is Harder Than It Looks

Building invoice PDFs seems simple until you actually do it. Here’s what teams run into:

Dynamic line items — Invoices have variable numbers of rows. Your template needs to handle 3 line items and 300 without breaking the layout.
Consistent formatting — Currency alignment, date formats, column widths — these need to look right on every invoice, not just your test data.
Page breaks — Long invoices need to flow across multiple pages with repeated headers and correct totals on the last page.
Branding — Logos, colors, fonts. Your invoices represent your company. But you shouldn’t need to hire a designer just to generate a clean invoice.
Multiple currencies and locales — International businesses need invoices that adapt to different tax formats, languages, and currency symbols.

Most teams spend weeks building a custom invoice renderer. Then they spend months maintaining it.

Two Ways to Create Invoice Templates

Option 1: Design It Yourself in the Visual Editor

AgentPDF’s editor lets anyone — developer, founder, ops person — build a professional invoice template. No design skills required. You drag and drop elements, set up your layout, and see exactly what the final PDF will look like. The editor uses the same deterministic rendering engine as the API, so what you see is what you get.

Option 2: Let Your AI Agent Design It

This is what makes AgentPDF fundamentally different. AgentPDF’s layout rendering engine is simple enough that AI agents can create templates programmatically. Your agent can:

Design the invoice layout from scratch via the API or MCP server
Set up columns, headers, line item sections, totals, and branding
Iterate on the design until it looks right
Save the template and immediately start generating PDFs from it

No human in the loop. No Figma. No designer. Your AI agent handles the entire process — from template creation to PDF generation.

Generate Invoices via API

Once your template exists (whether you or your agent created it), generating invoices is a single API call:

curl -X POST https://api.agentpdf.ai/v1/generate \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer YOUR_API_KEY" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{
    "templateId": "invoice-standard",
    "variables": {
      "invoiceNumber": "INV-2026-0451",
      "clientName": "Acme Corp",
      "clientEmail": "billing@acme.com",
      "issueDate": "2026-02-22",
      "dueDate": "2026-03-22",
      "lineItems": [
        { "description": "API Integration Setup", "qty": 1, "rate": 2500, "amount": 2500 },
        { "description": "Monthly Platform Fee — Feb 2026", "qty": 1, "rate": 499, "amount": 499 },
        { "description": "Additional PDF Renders (5,000)", "qty": 5, "rate": 0.02, "amount": 100 }
      ],
      "subtotal": "$3,099.00",
      "tax": "$247.92",
      "total": "$3,346.92"
    }
  }'

The response is a finished PDF. Same layout every time, regardless of how many line items or how long the client name is. That’s deterministic rendering — the same input always produces the exact same output.

Why Deterministic Rendering Matters for Invoices

Most PDF APIs use headless browsers (Puppeteer, Playwright) under the hood. That means your invoice output depends on Chrome’s rendering engine — which can produce different results depending on the OS, installed fonts, Chrome version, and even timing.

AgentPDF doesn’t use a browser. Our rendering engine is purpose-built for PDF output. The result:

Same data = same PDF. Every time. No rendering variance between environments.
No Chrome dependencies. No memory leaks, no zombie processes, no cold-start delays.
Predictable at scale. Generate 10 invoices or 10,000 with consistent performance.

Let AI Agents Run Your Billing

With AgentPDF’s MCP server, AI agents can own the entire invoice workflow:

Design the template — Agent creates the invoice layout using the simple rendering engine
Pull billing data — Agent queries your billing system (Stripe, your database, wherever)
Generate the PDF — One API call per invoice, deterministic output
Deliver it — Email to the customer, upload to your document store, attach to the Stripe invoice

This works for automated billing pipelines, accounts receivable, multi-tenant SaaS billing — anywhere you need invoices generated without human intervention.

Get Started

You don’t need a designer. You don’t need to build a custom renderer. Design your invoice template in the editor or let your AI agent create one, then generate deterministic PDFs at scale.

Try AgentPDF free →

How to Automate Invoice Generation With a PDF API