# Show HN: Open-weight OCR got so cheap I had to share it > Source: > Published: 2026-07-24 20:41:09+00:00 This was not supposed to become a product. When 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. So i set one up myself. I assumed that even after getting it running, serving a vision-language model would be expensive. It 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. The 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. So I had to share it. I made the endpoitns public, and vibe-coded a simple dashboard. Let me know what you think! Comments URL: [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49041317](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=49041317) Points: 2 # Comments: 0