Document Extraction Pricing — Work Out Your Break-Even in Documents, Not Dollars
Four extraction vendors, four different meters — per page, per credit, per document, and a $500 floor. The right choice depends entirely on your monthly volume. Here is where each one wins, from their own pricing pages.
Every other cost comparison on this site asks how long until the one-time price pays for itself? Document extraction is the one category where that is the wrong question.
Here the meter runs on documents, not months. So the number that decides your choice is not a date — it is a volume.
Four vendors, four different meters
From each vendor's own pricing page:
| Vendor | Published price | Meter | Read |
|---|---|---|---|
| Parseur | "Starts at $39/month" (annual, 100 pages); "$99/mo for 1,000 pages (10c/page)"; free tier 20 pages/month permanently | per page | parseur.com (2026-07-05) |
| Mindee | "$44/month" (billed annually at $529/year) — "= 0.044 per credit" | per credit | mindee.com/pricing (2026-07-05) |
| Docsumo | Was "$499 / month" Starter, up to 5,000 pages, on the 5 Jul 2026 page — withdrawn since: paid plans now read "Talk to us" (re-read 2026-08-11 and 2026-08-14; a free tier remains) | per page, in a block | docsumo.com/pricing |
| Veryfi | "$500+/mo" — "minimum commitment which buys you [under] 5k docs per month"; $0.08 per receipt, $0.16 per invoice | per document, over a floor | veryfi.com/pricing (2026-07-05) |
These four numbers are not comparable as printed. A page, a credit and a document are different units, and two of the four have floors underneath them.
Where the floors bite
Veryfi's $500 minimum is the steepest in our whole ledger, and its effect is worth showing rather than describing:
| Documents per month | At the published $0.08/receipt | Actual invoice | Effective rate |
|---|---|---|---|
| 200 | $16 | $500 | $2.50/doc — 31× the list rate |
| 500 | $40 | $500 | $1.00/doc |
| 2,000 | $160 | $500 | $0.25/doc |
| 6,250 | $500 | $500 | $0.08/doc |
Docsumo's Starter behaved the same way while it was published — $499 bought a block of up to 5,000 pages, so a business processing 300 pages paid the same as one processing 4,900. In August 2026 Docsumo withdrew that published price entirely; its paid plans are now quote-gated, which does not change the block-pricing lesson — it just moves the vendor into the category where you cannot read the floor at all before a sales call.
Both are correctly priced for their intended customer: a business doing thousands of documents a month. They are simply not priced for anyone below that, and the pricing page does not say so out loud.
Free tiers are where most small users should start instead — Parseur's is "20 pages/month included permanently"; Docsumo still shows a free tier as of 14 Aug 2026, though since the paid pricing was withdrawn you should confirm its current page limit on the vendor's own page. If your volume is genuinely small, start free and stop reading.
The middle of the market is where it gets interesting
Parseur at $39/month for 100 pages and Mindee at $44/month are aimed at the volume most small businesses actually have: tens to low hundreds of documents a month.
Over three years, that is $1,404 and $1,584 respectively — for a job that is, at bottom, read this receipt and give me the fields.
What the self-hosted option changes, and what it does not
Extracta is a self-hosted AI invoice extractor. $44.00, one time (product page, read 2026-08-01).
It removes the meter and replaces it with a different one, and the guide will not pretend otherwise:
"Do I need my own API key?" — "Yes — an OpenAI or Anthropic API key, or a local Ollama instance, is required; Extracta doesn't include one."
"What does it cost to use?" — "Extracta itself is a one-time purchase; your ongoing cost is only your own LLM usage, which varies by provider and model and should be checked with your provider."
So the comparison is: a vendor's meter with the vendor's markup, versus your provider's meter at your provider's price. That is a genuine structural difference — you pay the model owner directly instead of a company that resells the model owner — but it is not "free," and the product page does not claim it is.
The exception is the one that matters most for sensitive documents:
"OpenAI, Anthropic, and Ollama" are all supported — and with Ollama running locally, there is no per-document charge and no third party sees the document at all.
For invoices, receipts and contracts, that is a data-path difference, not a price difference — and it is the only configuration in this whole comparison where the document never leaves your building.
And the key handling is specified rather than assured:
"It's stored in your own database and transmitted only in the outbound HTTPS request you trigger to your chosen provider — never logged, echoed, or passed through any Extracta infrastructure."
The limitation that will decide it for some readers
"What about PDFs?" — "Image formats (PNG, JPEG, WebP) work reliably with all three providers; Anthropic handles text-layer PDFs natively, while OpenAI and Ollama treat PDFs as best-effort."
If your documents arrive as PDFs and you want to run locally on Ollama, that combination is explicitly "best-effort." Read that as: convert to images first, or use Anthropic, or accept variable results. A vendor that publishes the weak combination rather than burying it has earned some trust, but the limitation is real and it is common — most supplier invoices arrive as PDFs.
The gap this category actually has
Searching for self-hosted document extraction on 1 August 2026 returned OCR engines — Tesseract, EasyOCR, PaddleOCR — and the summaries were unusually clear about why that is not an answer:
"engines like Tesseract, EasyOCR, and PaddleOCR form the recognition layer… but none of them extract structured invoice data on their own" and "plain OCR engines… have no invoice-domain awareness and no table-structure preservation, which pushes line-item and field-mapping problems back onto your team."
So the self-hosted market here is a free engine or a metered API, with very little in between. A tool that supplies the domain layer — the prompt, the field mapping, the review queue — while calling a model you chose, sits in that gap. That is the honest description of what a one-time licence buys here: not the intelligence, the plumbing around it.
Choosing, by volume
Under ~20 documents/month — Parseur's permanent free tier. Pay nothing.
Small volume and you want hosted — Docsumo's free plan (confirm its current limit on the vendor's page — the published paid pricing was withdrawn in Aug 2026).
Tens to low hundreds, hosted, want zero infrastructure — Parseur or Mindee at $39–$44/month. Note that is $1,400–$1,600 over three years.
Thousands per month — Veryfi or Docsumo (Docsumo now quote-gated, so budget a sales call). The floors stop being punitive at volume and the accuracy engineering is what you are buying.
Any volume, but the documents are sensitive, or you want to pay the model owner directly — self-hosted with your own key, and local Ollama if the document must not leave the building.
Nobody should self-host expecting a free lunch. You have swapped a subscription for a usage bill you now administer.
The honest costs
You own the accuracy problem. A hosted vendor tunes extraction across millions of documents. Your results depend on your model choice and your prompts. Human-in-the-loop review is not optional at any volume that matters.
Model pricing moves. Providers reprice; you re-check. The product page's own advice is to verify with your provider, and that is permanent advice, not one-time.
Backups, uptime, hosting. "PHP 8+ with pdo, curl, and fileinfo — present on virtually all cPanel/Plesk hosts." For a concrete number from a named provider: Hetzner's own pricing — machine-read from the price API behind their pricing pages on 10 Aug 2026 — lists web-hosting plans from €1.60 to €16.72 a month and entry cloud servers from €3.99 a month (prices as returned for their German datacenters; confirm current pricing and VAT treatment at checkout). Any comparable host works — the point is that the "own" side of this comparison costs single-digit euros a month.
The short version
Work out your monthly volume first. It decides everything else.
Below twenty documents, use a free tier. In the hundreds, the hosted middle-market tools are $39–$44/month and perfectly reasonable. In the thousands, the $500 floors stop being a penalty and start being a fair price.
And if you are doing two hundred documents a month on a plan with a $500 minimum, you are paying thirty-one times the list rate for the privilege of being small. Check which side of the floor you are on before you renew anything.
Next steps
- Open the live Extracta demo — no sign-up, already signed in, resets itself
- Extracta product page and licence options
- The SaaS Price Observatory — Veryfi, Mindee, Docsumo, Parseur and 78 others, quoted from their own pages and dated
LLM running costs are not quoted here as a figure. They vary by provider and model and change without notice — check them with your provider, as the product page itself advises.