# What 1,000 invoices a month actually costs across five document-AI APIs

> Source: <https://dev.to/kyisaiah47/what-1000-invoices-a-month-actually-costs-across-five-document-ai-apis-2613>
> Published: 2026-07-10 18:34:06+00:00

Pricing pages for document-extraction APIs are written to win a different comparison than the

one you actually need. Per-page rates hide minimums. Credit systems hide per-document math.

So here's the arithmetic for one concrete, boring workload: **1,000 single-page invoices a
month**, at each vendor's published July-2026 pricing. (I sell one of these APIs — disclosure

| API | Published rate | 1,000 invoices/mo | The catch |
|---|---|---|---|
| AWS Textract (AnalyzeExpense) | $0.01/page | $10 |
You build the pipeline: retries, failures, schema mapping. Every attempt bills, including failed ones. |
| Google Document AI (Invoice parser) | $0.01/page | $10 |
Same deal. (Their Bank Statement parser is $0.75/classified doc.) |
| Azure Document Intelligence (prebuilt) | $0.01/page | $10 |
Same again — the hyperscalers are interchangeable here. |
| LlamaParse | $1.25/1k pages | ~$1.25 |
It's a parser, not an extractor: structure back, not validated invoice fields. Budget your own extraction layer (and its LLM bill) on top. |
| Veryfi | $0.16/invoice |
$160 — except no. Production starts at a $500/mo minimum buying <5k docs |
At 1,000 invoices your effective rate is $0.50/doc, not $0.16. |
| Kynth Core (mine) | $0.08/invoice | $80 |
Charged only when extraction succeeds; no minimum, no commitment. |

**1. What does a failure cost?** The per-page APIs bill per attempt. If your docs are ugly —

photographed receipts, scanned faxes, tables that explode — your effective

per-*successful*-document rate is higher than the sticker. That's why "cost per correctly

extracted document" (price ÷ accuracy) is the only number worth comparing, and why I publish

a reproducible accuracy benchmark alongside this post — including the suites where the

hyperscalers beat me.

**2. What does the minimum cost?** Veryfi's per-doc rates look adjacent to mine until the

commitment line. Minimums are a bet the vendor makes you place on your own volume. Process

800 invoices a month and you're paying for 5,000.

**3. Who owns the pipeline?** $10/month at Textract is real if your engineering time is free.

The hyperscaler APIs hand you fields; everything around them — schema validation, retries,

normalization, the 3am alert when a new invoice layout breaks parsing — is yours.

Kynth Core is my product, so weight my row accordingly. What I can offer instead of

neutrality is reproducibility: the accuracy benchmark behind these claims is an MIT-licensed

harness (public datasets, pinned revisions, raw responses committed, fork-safe CI) — re-run

every number with your own keys, or re-score my committed responses with no keys at all.

Links: [benchmark repo](https://github.com/kyisaiah47/doc-extract-bench) ·

[live scores](https://api.kynth.studio/benchmarks) ·

[pricing sources](https://api.kynth.studio/guides/invoice-ocr-api-pricing).
