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

A developer benchmarked the real cost of processing 1,000 invoices per month across five document-AI APIs, revealing hidden minimums and per-attempt billing that inflate effective rates. AWS Textract, Google Document AI, and Azure Document Intelligence all charge $10/month at $0.01/page but bill for failed attempts, while Veryfi's $0.16/invoice rate requires a $500/month minimum. The developer's own product, Kynth Core, charges $80/month with no minimum and only on successful extractions.

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 .