Upload a document, verify your email, and Hardparse creates the account with credit attached. No card required to try it. Browser uploads are saved to your verified account.
Every verified account starts with $1.00. The default route is charged at $0.005 per processed page, so you can test real documents before paying.
Three tiers mapping onto the benchmarks we publish at
codesota.com/ocr.
/v1/parse
routes to tier: "balanced"
unless you opt into something else. The default web OCR route is priced today at $0.005/page.
A layout-aware VLM pipeline sitting within a few points of the frontier at a tiny fraction of the cost, running on our GPUs. This is the tier you want 99% of the time — production workloads, RAG pipelines, document ingestion jobs.
Frontier quality for the last couple of points: compliance runs, eval suites, audit trails. Routes to whichever model is top of the CodeSOTA OCR leaderboard. Most workloads don't need this. When they do, one flag flips.
Smallest model that still clears the quality bar — 3–8B open checkpoints, distilled variants. When you're doing a million calls, money wins. Background OCR, bulk archive work, pre-processing before LLM calls.
Vendor APIs charge 10–150× what open-weight VLMs actually cost to run. We pass the open-model economics through, keep a fair margin, and publish the benchmarks so you can check our work.
| Vendor | Per 1K pages | Quality class | Open weights |
|---|---|---|---|
| Hardparse ● live | $0.005/page · $1.00 free | balanced · 95% of SOTA | yes |
| Google Document AI | $100–$1,500 | Good on printed docs | no |
| Azure AI Document Intelligence | $50–$1,500 | Tiers by feature | no |
| Mistral OCR | $1,000 | Closed, fast | no |
| Tesseract (self-host) | $0 + ops | Dated · loses structure | yes |
When the pipeline is stable enough that we'd be comfortable billing someone for it. No hard date — we'd rather leave it free a month too long than charge for something that's still rough. We'll email everyone who's used the API before flipping the switch, and keep a grandfathered tier for early adopters.
Yes — there will always be an anonymous free tier rate-limited by IP. We expect that limit to drop (from 100/day to maybe 25/day) when paid tiers activate, but the keyless "try it now" workflow is permanent.
Because the cost gap between the best open VLM and the best frontier model is roughly 150×, and forcing every user onto the frontier wastes money 99% of the time. This is the CodeSOTA thesis: three tiers, you pick the trade-off, we run the rest.
No — numbers above are targets, not commitments. We'll finalize when we have enough throughput data from beta to price without guessing. If the final number surprises you, we'll grandfather beta users at the target prices shown here.
Not yet. We're preparing a published Docker image so teams that need on-prem for compliance reasons can run the full pipeline themselves. Email k.wikiel@gmail.com if that's you and we'll get you early access.
Email k.wikiel@gmail.com with your expected volume and any compliance constraints. Volume discounts and dedicated capacity are available today in beta for teams willing to commit.
We publish the numbers behind each model at codesota.com. If a frontier API beats the open-source tier for your task, we'll say so — and so will the leaderboard.