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Comment by lgvld | Hacker News Reader

Very useful product, congratulations. ;-)

Quite expensive though. When I use an API, I usually assume (1) there will be some significant base volume, and (2) this volume has no upper bound, depending on my users behavior. For ~750 € you can only process 1k documents during the month... hard-capped? The price schemes seem to target entreprise but entreprises usually have bigger volumes than that. (But maybe I confuse API calls and document processing with your product?)

But it’s nice you released SDK in several common languages.

Good luck!

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Wow so if I’m reading this they charge about $1 USD per “document”?

I’ve been looking for an easy OCR solution considering I have about 10,000 one-page documents a month (invoices). For comparison, Amazon textract is ~$0.05/pg for key-value pairs, but it involves more programming to set up.

If you're looking for something that's robust and easy to setup but a bit more expensive than Textract, check out https://www.impira.com/ (Disclaimer: I am the founder/CEO there).

With an annual plan of 10,000 documents per month, we charge $0.04 per document. If you try it out, I'd love to hear your feedback on the quality of OCR!

I think you might like fintract[0]; never tried them just stumbled upon them.

[0]: https://www.fintract.io/en/

Shameless Plug: Want to try at 0.025/page on the UI? We can help you.

Thanks! This is Claudio, PSPDFKit's CTO.

At this point in time the price is per generated document - irrespectively of how complicated the operation is.

Because you can combine operations in one http call, you're incentivised to do that as opposed to perform separate calls which increase the possibility of errors and cost for all sides.

Happily taking feedback though - your comment around hard-cap is definitely sound, for example.

> At this point in time the price is per generated document - irrespectively of how complicated the operation is.

As part of an integration for a few customers we do relatively simple PDF operations. Combining a few TIFFs into a PDF, or splitting a PDF into separate PDF per page for example. Think invoices vs orders. Can be a royal PITA though due to edge cases in terms of whatever generated the TIFFs or PDFs.

However each of our customers have 1-10k documents per day, and we're in Scandinavia so small fries in terms of volume.

edit: OCR and table extraction is something that might be very interesting depending on quality, but again even 10k/mo seems low for most of our larger customers.

The volume you’re describing is totally doable. We can do custom plans if you’re interested - there’s a contact link at https://pspdfkit.com/api/pricing/.

For higher volume, but simpler operations (merge, watermark, encrypt/decrypt, etc.) you can try https://www.pdfblocks.com/api. You get 10K docs processed for $29/mo, and 1M for $99/mo. We don't have conversion, OCR, generation, or chained operations though.

Source: I work at PDF Blocks

Is it appropriate to have multiple competitors pitch their own products in an Ask HN? this should not be such an opportunity

Considering I often come to things like Show HN/Ask HN to see what exists in the world, yes. I say it is not only appropriate but within the spirit of fostering good conversation and interest in the community. (Obviously only as such competition remains civil.)

Absolutely, especially in such a crowded mature space it makes total sense to discuss the full market. As others have said, I like to come to the comments to learn not just about the product at hand but of what else is out there, show hn isn’t some exclusive show room for the product in the title.

Why not?

Also, it’s a Show HN.

Seems reasonable to share alternatives.

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