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When calling the POST /v3/convert/{type} endpoint, PDFShift will return you a different set of response that depends on the parameters you provided.
This is important to take into consideration when developing your logic

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Default response

By default, PDFShift will return the raw binary document (either a PDF, JPEG, PNG or WEBP).

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filename parameter

But if you pass the filename parameter, the result will be a JSON object and the binary data will be stored on an S3 storage. Here’s a sample of the JSON response: 
{
    "success": true,
    "url": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/pdfshift/d/2/2019-05/99c456250a01448686d81752a3fb5beb/15466098-8368-49e1-ac33-ff4c3941a0df.pdf",
    "filesize": 259972,
    "duration": 1500,
    "response": {
        "duration": 2562,
        "status-code": 200
    },
    "executed": "2025-12-02T12:34:56.789Z",
    "pdf_pages": 5
}
The pdf_pages is obviously only present when converting to a PDF document
This is because when you pass filename, you indicate to PDFShift that you don’t want to receive back the binary PDF, but you want to create a file and receive a pointer to that file, which is represented by the “url” parameter.

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webhook parameter

Finally, if you pass the webhook parameter, you ask PDFShift to convert the document and then send you the data not in response, but as a POST request toward your server (provided by the webhook value). In this case, PDFShift will send a POST request to your server with the same data as for the filename parameter, such as : 
{
    "success": true,
    "url": "https://s3.amazonaws.com/pdfshift/d/2/2019-05/99c456250a01448686d81752a3fb5beb/15466098-8368-49e1-ac33-ff4c3941a0df.pdf",
    "filesize": 259972,
    "duration": 1500,
    "response": {
        "duration": 2562,
        "status-code": 200
    },
    "executed": "2025-12-02T12:34:56.789Z",
    "pdf_pages": 5
}
You can read more about the Webhook events at Webhook events.