Cheapest OCR API for Layout & Tables

Gallery

About

This was not supposed to become a product.When PaddleOCR-VL-1.6 dropped, independent benchmarks put it at the top of document parsing models. I had to try it. I needed a provider, but there simply isn't one ready for production that I would trust.So i set one up myself. I assumed that even after getting it running, serving a vision-language model would be expensive.It turns out the opposite is true. Once I had it running properly, the cost was absurdly low. At proper GPU utilization, the cost is only around $1 per 1,000 pages.The nearest competitors are either much lower quality (Azure Read) or absurdly expensive (Extend or Reducto). Even Mistral OCR 4 which is really good and pretty cheap is still 4x more expensive.So I had to share it. I made the endpoitns public, and vibe-coded a simple dashboard.Let me know what you think!