Free invoice and receipt OCR APIs, compared.

Which invoice OCR APIs have a genuinely free tier in 2026?

Nine of the fourteen APIs on this page run a recurring monthly allowance rather than a trial: LlamaParse, Azure Document Intelligence, Tabscanner, Veryfi, ParseRail, Invoice Data Extraction, Parseur, Eagle Doc, and Google Document AI on one processor only. Three run trials and call it a free plan — Mindee for 14 days, DocuClipper for 14 days and up to 120 pages, Taggun for 30 days and up to 1,000 scans. Two more look recurring and are not: AWS Textract grants 100 pages a month but only for the first three months of a new AWS account, and Nanonets grants $50 in credits once, after which a $100/month floor applies.

The split matters because the two kinds answer different questions. A trial tells you whether the extraction is accurate enough on your documents, which is worth knowing and takes about an afternoon. A recurring allowance lets a low-traffic product sit in production without a bill, and lets an integration stay live while you decide about the rest of the year. If you are evaluating, any of the fourteen will do. If you are shipping something small, only the nine are relevant, and only six of those return validated invoice or receipt fields rather than page text.

How many invoices a month can you actually process for free?

Between 20 and 10,000 one-page documents a month, depending on the vendor and on how much of the work you want done for you. The eight recurring allowances that handle invoices, largest first:

1. LlamaParse — 10,000 pages a month. The largest free allowance here by a factor of twenty, and the one that does the least. LlamaParse parses — it returns document structure and text, not validated invoice fields. Basic mode spends one credit a page, so 10,000 credits is 10,000 pages; richer modes spend more. You still budget an extraction layer on top.
2. Azure Document Intelligence — 500 pages a month. The largest free tier that returns actual invoice fields, and it recurs indefinitely on the F0 tier. The catch is on the other side of it: Azure publishes every paid rate as a “$-” placeholder that defers to a signed-in calculator, so you cannot price your second month before you commit to it.
3. Tabscanner — 200 receipts a month. Receipts and nothing else. Tabscanner defines its unit plainly — “1 credit = 1 receipt scan” — and takes no card for the Starter plan. If receipts are your only document, this is the most generous no-card free tier that returns structured fields.
4. Veryfi — 100 documents a month. Labelled “Free Forever” on Veryfi’s own pricing page, and it covers any supported document type rather than one. The step off it is the steepest on this table: the next plan up is a $500/month minimum commitment.
5. ParseRail — 62 invoices, 83 receipts or 41 bank statements a month. 500 credits land every month, no card. An invoice spends 8 credits, a receipt 6, a bank statement 12. Smaller than four of the tiers above it. What is different is the far side: $0.08 an invoice, published, no minimum, no plan, and billed only when extraction succeeds against your schema.
6. Invoice Data Extraction — 50 pages a month. No subscription and no monthly minimum on the paid side either — you buy credit packs when you need them, and it bills only on a successful process. The pack prices are not published.
7. Parseur — 20 pages a month. Parseur counts a whole email or spreadsheet as one page regardless of length, which makes 20 pages go further than it reads if your inputs arrive by email. Documents are retained 90 days on the free tier.
8. Eagle Doc — 20 pages a month. The same allowance as Parseur, and the cheapest paid step off any free tier here — €5.00 a month for 166 pages, excluding VAT. Prices are published in euro only.

Read that list in the right order and it stops being a ranking of generosity. The two largest allowances each cost you something the number does not show: LlamaParse gives you 10,000 pages of structure you then have to extract fields from, and Azure gives you 500 pages of real fields against a paid rate it will not publish until you sign in. The question a free tier should answer is not how long you can avoid paying. It is what the first paid document costs, and whether you can find that number out before you depend on it.

Does Google Document AI have a free tier?

Yes, but not on the parsers you would use for an invoice or a receipt. Google’s Document AI pricing page lists exactly one processor with a free band — the Enterprise Document OCR Processor, priced “0 count to 1,000 count $0.00 (Free)”, then $1.50 for the 1,000-to-5,000,000 count band and $0.60 above that, charged per 1,000 counts in the same way Google’s own worked example prices its Form Parser at “$30 / 1,000 pages”. Since Google defines one count as “up to 10 pages in a document”, that free band is worth up to 10,000 pages of OCR a month. What it returns is text and layout — not a supplier name, an invoice total, or a line-item array.

The parsers that do return those fields carry no free band at all. Google lists the Invoice parser at $0.10 / 1 count, the Expense parser (which its own page labels “formerly receipt parser”) at $0.10 / 1 count, and the Bank statement parser at $0.75 per classified document— flat rates from the first document, with no tiered $0.00 row above them. So the honest answer to “is Google Document AI free” is that a one-page invoice costs ten cents on your first call and every call after it, and the free allowance you may have read about elsewhere belongs to a different processor doing a different job. One term does work in your favour: Google states that if a document contains no eligible form, “processing doesn’t occur and no charge is made.”

What happens when the free tier runs out?

This is the number to shop on, and it is the one the free-tier comparisons leave out. Veryfi’s hundred free documents are followed by a $500/month minimum commitmentthat buys fewer than 5,000 documents — so the 101st document does not cost $0.16, it costs whatever $500 divided by your real monthly volume works out to. Mindee’s cheapest published plan is $44/month billed annually, $529 up front, and the smallest volume it sells is 6,000 credits a month. Nanonets sets a $100/month floor the moment the $50 grant is gone. Azure publishes no rate to run out into at all.

Four vendors here let you cross the line without a step up. Eagle Doc’s first paid tier is €5.00 a month for 166 pages, excluding VAT — the cheapest paid step on this table. Invoice Data Extraction sells credit packs with no subscription and no minimum. AWS Textract charges $0.01 a page on AnalyzeExpense with no floor, which remains the cheapest headline rate in this market and we are not going to pretend otherwise. ParseRail charges $0.08 an invoice and $0.06 a receipt — published, no plan, no minimum, and billed only when extraction succeeds against your schema. The 500 free credits land again the following month whether you spent them or not.

Methodology

Every figure on this page was read from the vendor’s own public pricing page — never from a summary, a reseller, or a remembered number. Where a vendor publishes no figure, this page publishes none and says so. A free tier is counted as “recurring” only where the vendor’s own page states a monthly allowance; anything time-boxed is a trial here, whatever the vendor calls it.

Read fresh on 13 August 2026. Veryfipublishes a “Free” plan at “Process up to 100 docs/mo” for “$0” marked “Free Forever”, with its Starter tier described as a “$500/mo minimum commitment”; separately its header offers a “Free 14-day trial, no credit card required”. LlamaParselists a “Free $0 /month” plan that “Includes 10K credits”, with Starter at $50/month including 40K; its own FAQ describes “a generous provision of 10k free credits a month to all new users”. Parseurstates “Start on our free tier, which includes 20 pages every month”, and its feature table gives the free tier a 90-day document retention period and one user. Tabscannerlists Starter at “$0 FREE” with “200 credits per month”, above the line “1 credit = 1 receipt scan. No credit card required for starter plan.” Google Document AIlists the Enterprise Document OCR Processor at “0 count to 1,000 count $0.00 (Free)” and its Invoice parser, Expense parser and Bank statement parser at $0.10/count, $0.10/count and $0.75 per classified document respectively, with no free band on any of the three, under the footnote “1 count equals up to 10 pages in a document”.

Carried from the register, with their own dates. Invoice Data Extraction (50 pages/month, no card, no subscription), Eagle Doc (20 pages/month at €0.00, €5.00/month Starter for 166 pages excluding VAT) and Nanonets ($50 one-time credits, $100/month floor) were read at source on 12 August 2026. Azure Document Intelligence’s 0–500 pages/month F0 tier was reconfirmed on 9 August 2026 — it is the only Azure figure published as a number rather than a “$-” placeholder, which is why this page states Azure’s free tier and refuses to state its paid rate. AWS Textract (100 pages/month for the first three months, $0.01/page on AnalyzeExpense thereafter) and Taggun (30-day trial, up to 1,000 scans) were read on 7 August 2026. Mindee (no free tier, 14-day trial, $44/month billed annually as the published floor, 6,000 credits the smallest volume sold) and DocuClipper(no free tier, 14-day trial up to 120 pages) were read on 6 August 2026. All of these are held in this repository’s dated-claim register and re-checked against source on a daily cycle; a value that cannot be re-read is marked rather than quietly kept.

ParseRail’s own figures are the live platform rates: 500 free credits granted every month with no card, one credit is one cent, and an invoice spends 8 credits, a receipt 6, a bank statement 12. This page carries no accuracy claims — how well extraction actually performs is scored in the open at /benchmarks. For what each API charges per document once you are paying, see invoice OCR API pricing compared; for receipts specifically, see receipt OCR APIs for developers; and for which API fits a given job rather than which is cheapest, see the best document extraction APIs in 2026.