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OCR Cost Calculator

Calculate the API cost of running optical character recognition on documents or images.

About OCR Cost Calculator

Cloud OCR services typically bill per page (or per 1,000 pages) processed, while self-hosted engines like Tesseract are free but require your own compute and maintenance. This calculator multiplies page count by the provider's per-page rate. Self-hosted OCR trades zero per-page cost for infrastructure and accuracy tradeoffs versus managed cloud services.

Formula

total_cost = pages × rate_per_page

pages
Number of pages to process
rate_per_page
Provider cost per page

Worked example

With the default values below, OCR Cost Calculator returns Total Cost of $1.50. Change any input above and every figure here is recalculated in your browser.

Inputs used

Number of Pagesaccepts 1–100,000,000 pages
1,000 pages
OCR Providerone of Tesseract (free, self-hosted), Google Cloud Vision OCR, AWS Textract, Azure Document Intelligence
Google Cloud Vision OCR

Results

Total Cost
$1.50
Price per Page
$0.0015

Step by step

  1. 1Total cost= $1.50

Assumptions and limits

  • The result is derived only from the 2 inputs listed above. Anything not among them is not part of the calculation.
  • In particular, this calculator does not take inflation, tax, fees or charges or compounding frequency into account.
  • Figures are rounded for display to 4 decimal places, so totals built from several rounded parts can differ slightly from the unrounded arithmetic.

How these calculators are built and tested is described on the Methodology page. If a figure looks wrong, please report it.

Frequently Asked Questions

Is Tesseract really free?

Tesseract itself has no licensing cost, but you still pay for the compute infrastructure to run it and typically get lower accuracy on complex layouts than paid cloud OCR.

Do handwriting or table extraction cost extra?

Yes, most cloud providers charge a premium for advanced features like handwriting recognition, table extraction, or form-field parsing beyond basic text detection.

How is a 'page' defined for pricing?

Providers typically define a page as one image or one PDF page up to a certain resolution; very large images may be billed as multiple pages.

Related Calculators

OCR Cost Calculator – Calculate Total Cost & Price per Page