Calculate the API cost of running optical character recognition on documents or images.
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.
total_cost = pages × rate_per_page
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.
Yes, most cloud providers charge a premium for advanced features like handwriting recognition, table extraction, or form-field parsing beyond basic text detection.
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.