What Will Your Document OCR Cost Per Month?
Compare managed cloud OCR APIs (AWS Textract and Google Cloud Vision) against dedicated self-hosted CPU pipelines based on your monthly page volume.
Adjust slider or type any volume from 1,000 to 10M+ pages.
Presets are measured mean elapsed OCR-call times from the gold-set benchmark on an Intel Core i5-10210U laptop (Ubuntu 22.04 / WSL2, eight logical CPUs): Tesseract ~3.7s/page; B.L.A.S.T. ~16.5s/page. They cover the OCR call only, exclude restoration, and do not measure single-thread CPU use or throughput on your server.
Illustrative default: $40 per worker per month. Enter your own hosting cost.
Estimated Monthly Spend (100,000 pages)
Verified Source Data & Methodology
Prices from the AWS and Google Cloud pricing pages, checked 23 October 2026. Check them before you rely on this. AWS totals use US West (Oregon) list rates outside the three-month new-customer free tier. Google totals include the first 1,000 OCR units each month free.
- AWS Textract Pricing: https://aws.amazon.com/textract/pricing/ (Detect Document Text: $1.50/1k through 1M, $0.60/1k after. Tables: $15/1k through 1M, $10/1k after. Forms: $50/1k through 1M, $40/1k after. Tables + Forms: $65/1k through 1M, $50/1k after. US West (Oregon) list rates outside the three-month new-customer free tier. Accessed 23 October 2026).
- Google Cloud Vision Pricing: https://cloud.google.com/vision/pricing (Document Text Detection: First 1,000 units/mo free, $1.50/1k through 5M total units, $0.60/1k thereafter. Accessed 23 October 2026).
- Self-Hosted Benchmarks: Preset timings are elapsed OCR-call times from the gold-set benchmark data in
data/benchmarks/2026-10-20-ocrmeasured on an Intel Core i5-10210U laptop CPU (Ubuntu 22.04 / WSL2); they exclude restoration and do not measure single-thread CPU use or throughput on your server. See the full Scanned-Book OCR Benchmark and Gutter & Reading Order Guide. - Self-Hosted Hosting Costs: Enter your own hosting cost; the $40 default is illustrative. The calculation projects benchmark-equivalent worker-hours and workers at 730 available hours/month. Extraction beyond the OCR stage is not estimated.
Frequently Asked Questions
- When does self-hosted OCR become cheaper than AWS Textract or Google Cloud Vision?
- Break-even depends on the server price and measured throughput you enter. Compare costs for the same required output. This calculator estimates OCR charges and illustrative worker costs; it does not establish table or form extraction costs, equivalent accuracy, or a typical break-even volume.
- How is the self-hosted compute requirement calculated?
- Worker-hours equal page volume × elapsed seconds per page ÷ 3,600. This illustration assumes one sequential worker per benchmark-equivalent machine and 730 available hours per month. Preset timings cover the OCR call only, exclude restoration, and do not establish single-thread CPU use or throughput on your server. Enter a measured end-to-end time for your deployment.
- What hardware was used to measure the default OCR latencies?
- Latencies were measured on an Intel Core i5-10210U laptop CPU (Ubuntu 22.04 on WSL2, 8 logical CPUs, 10 GB RAM) across the 14 scanned book spreads in the gold benchmark corpus: Tesseract 4.1.1 averaged 3.654 seconds per page, while B.L.A.S.T. averaged 16.538 seconds per page.
- Are document uploads sent over the network when using this estimator?
- No. This calculator executes 100% client-side in your browser. No document files, volume numbers, or financial parameters are uploaded or transmitted across the network.
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