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per month—per page
—per 1,000 pages
—per year
The OCR bill is only half the story
Extraction is cheap; the expensive part is usually the LLM you feed the text into. Budget both. Estimate the LLM half on the PDF processing cost calculator.
The cost of extracting text from documents with an AI OCR API.
Extraction is cheap; the expensive part is usually the LLM you feed the text into. Budget both. Estimate the LLM half on the PDF processing cost calculator.
The OCR / Document AI Cost Calculator estimates your monthly document text-extraction bill by multiplying two inputs: the number of pages processed per month and the price charged per page. Most OCR and document AI services meter usage at the page level, so a single scanned document counts as several billable units. The calculator turns these two numbers into a clear monthly total, letting you see how a per-page rate compounds across thousands of pages before you commit to a provider or plan.
The main lever to watch is page volume, since even a small per-page price adds up quickly at scale. When comparing vendors, confirm what counts as a page—multi-page PDFs, re-processing, and failed extractions may each be billed—and check for tiered pricing that lowers the per-page rate at higher volumes. Running realistic monthly estimates helps you decide whether a cheaper flat rate or a volume discount actually fits your document workload.
Basic text extraction is often a fraction of a cent per page; structured document AI (tables, forms, layout) costs more. Multiply your monthly page volume by the per-page rate for the bill.
OCR gets the text cheaply, but if you then feed it to an LLM you pay tokens on every page. For document Q&A, that LLM cost usually dwarfs the OCR cost.
Cost at different volumes:
| Volume | Monthly | Yearly |
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