{"slug": "show-hn-open-weight-ocr-got-so-cheap-i-had-to-share-it", "title": "Show HN: Open-weight OCR got so cheap I had to share it", "summary": "A developer built a production-ready OCR service using PaddleOCR-VL-1.6 after finding no trusted provider, achieving a cost of roughly $1 per 1,000 pages. The service undercuts competitors like Mistral OCR 4, which is 4x more expensive, and offers higher quality than Azure Read. The endpoints and a simple dashboard are now publicly available.", "body_md": "This was not supposed to become a product.\n\nWhen PaddleOCR-VL-1.6 dropped, independent benchmarks put it at the top of document parsing models. I had to try it. I needed a provider, but there simply isn't one ready for production that I would trust.\n\nSo i set one up myself. I assumed that even after getting it running, serving a vision-language model would be expensive.\n\nIt turns out the opposite is true. Once I had it running properly, the cost was absurdly low. At proper GPU utilization, the cost is only around $1 per 1,000 pages.\n\nThe nearest competitors are either much lower quality (Azure Read) or absurdly expensive (Extend or Reducto). Even Mistral OCR 4 which is really good and pretty cheap is still 4x more expensive.\n\nSo I had to share it. I made the endpoitns public, and vibe-coded a simple dashboard.\n\nLet me know what you think!\n\nComments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49041317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49041317)\n\nPoints: 2\n\n# Comments: 0", "url": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-open-weight-ocr-got-so-cheap-i-had-to-share-it", "canonical_source": "https://www.openparser.dev/cheapest-ocr", "published_at": "2026-07-24 20:41:09+00:00", "updated_at": "2026-07-24 20:52:27.733772+00:00", "lang": "en", "topics": ["artificial-intelligence", "computer-vision", "ai-products", "ai-tools", "ai-infrastructure"], "entities": ["PaddleOCR-VL-1.6", "Azure Read", "Mistral OCR 4", "Extend", "Reducto"], "alternates": {"html": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-open-weight-ocr-got-so-cheap-i-had-to-share-it", "markdown": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-open-weight-ocr-got-so-cheap-i-had-to-share-it.md", "text": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-open-weight-ocr-got-so-cheap-i-had-to-share-it.txt", "jsonld": "https://wpnews.pro/news/show-hn-open-weight-ocr-got-so-cheap-i-had-to-share-it.jsonld"}}