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Tutorial··5 min read

Automate weekly pricing-page PDFs with Zapier + Rendershot

A no-code Zap that captures your competitor's pricing page every Monday and emails the PDF to your team — set up in 10 minutes, zero maintenance.

Pricing pages change constantly and nobody notices. If you run a startup that competes on price, or a product team that needs a historical record for exec reviews, a weekly PDF archive of every page that matters is the kind of chore you definitely won't keep up manually.

This post walks through a Zap that does it for you: every Monday at 9am, render your competitor's pricing page as a PDF and email it to the team. Takes ten minutes end-to-end. Zero ongoing maintenance.

The two pieces:

  1. Schedule by Zapier — built-in trigger that fires on a cron.
  2. Rendershot — captures the URL, exposes the file to downstream steps via a presigned URL.

What you'll need

  • A Rendershot account (free plan works — 200 renders/month).
  • A Zapier account.
  • The URL of the pricing page you want to archive. For this tutorial I'll use https://competitor.example.com/pricing.

Step 1 — Add the Rendershot app to your Zapier account

Click this invite link while signed in to Zapier:

Add Rendershot to Zapier →

Zapier adds the app to your account and the three building blocks — Capture Screenshot, Capture PDF, and the New Render trigger — show up in the Zap editor.

Step 2 — Create a Rendershot API key

Open rendershot.io/dashboard/keys and click Generate key. Copy the value — it starts with sk_live_….

Step 3 — Build the Zap

In the Zapier editor:

Trigger: Schedule by Zapier

  • App: Schedule by Zapier
  • Event: Every Week
  • Day of week: Monday
  • Time: 09:00

Test the trigger — Zapier produces a sample "pretty_date" value.

Action 1: Rendershot — Capture PDF

  • App: Rendershot
  • Event: Capture PDF

When asked to connect, paste your sk_live_… key. Zapier verifies it against GET /v1/ping (free — no credits consumed).

Configure:

  • URL: https://competitor.example.com/pricing
  • Paper size: A4
  • Orientation: Portrait
  • Print background graphics: on
  • Wait for: Network idle (lazy-loaded content, slower) — pricing pages often lazy-load A/B test variants, Network idle gives the page time to settle.

Test the step. You'll get back a job_id, status: queued, and a result_url.

Action 2: Rendershot — New Render (wait step)

Here's the clever bit: Rendershot actions return a job ID immediately, not the finished PDF. We need to wait until the render completes to attach the actual file to an email.

The new_render trigger fires when any async render in your account finishes. You can either:

  1. Add a second Zap with new_render as the trigger and Gmail as the action (decoupled; recommended).
  2. Use the Rendershot new_render step with a job ID filter inside this Zap.

For simplicity, use approach 1 — it scales better and keeps each Zap doing one thing.

Action 3: Gmail — Send Email (in the second Zap)

Create a second Zap with:

  • Trigger: Rendershot → New Render
  • Action: Gmail → Send Email

In the Gmail step:

  • To: team@example.com
  • Subject: Competitor pricing snapshot — {{New Render Completed At}}
  • Body: A short note plus the {{File URL}} field.
  • Attachments: map to {{File URL (no auth required, 24h)}} — the 24-hour presigned URL Rendershot ships in every webhook payload.

Step 4 — Publish both Zaps

Turn them on. The first Zap fires every Monday at 9am, queues a render. A few seconds later Rendershot delivers a job.completed webhook to Zapier, which fires the second Zap, which emails the team the PDF.

Cost per week: 1 Rendershot credit + 1 Zapier task per step. On the free Rendershot plan that's 0.5% of your monthly budget.

Going further

Once the two Zaps are running, the pattern generalises:

  • Archive multiple competitors. Put URLs in a Google Sheet, change the first Zap's trigger to Sheets → New Row, and the single Zap captures all of them as they're added.
  • Post to Slack instead of Gmail. Swap the second Zap's action to Slack → Upload File. Same File URL field, same auth-less fetch.
  • Upload to Dropbox / Google Drive. For long-term archiving. Both apps have "Upload File from URL" actions that work with the File URL.
  • Diff against last week's PDF. Pipe both weeks through a diff tool — out of scope for this post but a natural next step.

Why this works

The reason this Zap is reliable (vs. something you wire with a headless browser script on a cron) is the three pieces that Rendershot ships out of the box for no-code pipelines:

  1. Async rendering — long pages don't time out mid-Zap.
  2. Webhook trigger — Zapier doesn't need to poll; it reacts to the completed event.
  3. Presigned File URL — downstream steps can fetch the file without injecting an API key, which Zapier can't do when attaching files to emails or uploading to cloud storage.

That last point is the most common foot-gun with screenshot/PDF APIs in no-code land. Rendershot's new_render trigger hands you a 24-hour presigned URL on every completed render so attachments just work.

Want to try? The free Rendershot plan includes 200 renders / month — enough to run this Zap for ~4 years without paying. Grab an API key, then add Rendershot to Zapier. More on the integration in the Zapier setup guide.

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