Receipt OCR APIs for developers, compared.
Seven APIs that turn a photographed receipt into structured JSON — what each one charges per receipt, what it costs to get in the door, and which ones make you commit before you send the first request. Every number read from the vendor’s own pricing page. By Isaiah Kim · Updated 2026-08-07.
| API | Per receipt | Entry price | Minimum | Free tier |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ParseRailours | $0.06/receipt | None — pay per receipt | None — charged only on success | 500 credits/mo (~83 receipts) |
| Taggun | $0.056 effective, $0.060 over-usage (Developer) → $0.040 (Advanced) | $28/mo Developer, 500 scans | A plan is required | None — 30-day trial, up to 1,000 scans |
| Tabscanner | $0.08/excess credit → $0.06 (Business) | $24/mo, 300 credits | None stated | 200 credits/mo (Starter) |
| Veryfi | $0.08/document | $500/mo commitment | $500/mo, buys fewer than 5,000 docs | 100 docs/mo |
| Nanonets | $0.02–$0.30 per block run (by complexity) | $100/mo after free credits | $100/mo | $50 in credits, no card |
| AWS Textract | $0.01/page (AnalyzeExpense) | None — pay per page | None | 100 pages/mo, first 3 months only |
| Google Document AI | $0.10 per count, 1 count = up to 10 pages | None — pay per document | None | None on specialized parsers |
Taggun, Tabscanner and AWS Textract were read at source on 2026-08-07. Nanonets carries its 3 August 2026 reading, Veryfi its 5 August 2026 reading, and Google Document AI its 29 July 2026 reading. Sources and caveats in Methodology below.
What does a receipt OCR API cost per receipt in 2026?
Between one cent and ten cents a receipt on published rates, with the spread driven almost entirely by what you are buying rather than by accuracy. AWS Textract charges $0.01 per page through AnalyzeExpense and is the cheapest headline rate on this table by a factor of six. Taggun publishes two numbers per plan and they are not the same: its Developer plan works out at $0.056 a scanif you use all 500 included scans — what Taggun calls the “Effective Per Scan Price” — while scans beyond the allowance bill at the “Over-usage Per Scan Price” of $0.060. Both fall to $0.040 on Advanced. Tabscanner charges $0.08 per excess credit above its $24 plan, dropping to $0.06 on Business. ParseRail charges $0.06 a receipt. Veryfi charges $0.08 a document. Google Document AI’s Expense parser is the outlier at $0.10 per count, where Google’s own pricing page defines one count as “up to 10 pages in a document” — a rule that penalises the single-page receipt and rewards the long one.
The headline rate is the wrong number to shop on, because four of these seven do not let you pay it. Taggun requires a monthly plan. Tabscanner’s per-credit rates are overage rates on top of one. Nanonets sets a $100/month floor. Veryfi requires a $500/month commitment that buys fewer than 5,000 documents. Only AWS Textract, Google Document AI and ParseRail let a developer send one receipt and pay for one receipt.
What does it cost to run 1,000 receipts a month?
A thousand single-page receipts a month is a real small-product volume, and it is where the minimums stop being a footnote. Priced from the published rates above:
- AWS Textract — $10. 1,000 single-page receipts × $0.01/page on AnalyzeExpense. You assemble the pipeline.
- Taggun — $58. $28 Developer plan (500 scans) + 500 overage scans × $0.060.
- ParseRail — $60. 1,000 × $0.06, no plan, no minimum. The 500 free monthly credits cover the first ~83.
- Tabscanner — $80. $24 plan (300 credits) + 700 excess credits × $0.08.
- Google Document AI — $100. 1,000 counts × $0.10 on the Expense parser. A 10-page receipt costs the same as a 1-page one.
- Nanonets — $100+. The $100/mo floor. Actual usage bills per block run at $0.02–$0.30, so the true figure depends on your workflow.
- Veryfi — $500. 1,000 × $0.08 is $80, but the $500/mo minimum applies. Effective rate: $0.50 a receipt.
Two things in that list are worth saying plainly. AWS Textract is six times cheaper than we are and we are not going to pretend otherwise — if per-receipt cost is the only thing you are optimising and you are already inside AWS, use Textract. And Veryfi at this volume costs fifty cents a receipt, not eight, because the minimum swallows the rate. The gap between $10 and $500 for identical work is not an accuracy gap. It is a packaging gap.
Taggun vs Tabscanner: which is cheaper?
Taggun is cheaper at every volume where both publish a rate. Taggun’s entry plan is $28 a month for 500 scans— $0.056 a scan used in full — with over-usage at $0.060; Tabscanner’s is $24 a month for 300 creditswith overage at $0.08. The $4 saving on the plan is gone by the four-hundredth receipt. At the top of the published ladders Taggun’s Advanced plan is $799 a month for 20,000 scans — four cents each — while Tabscanner’s Business plan is $360 for 6,000 credits at six cents overage.
Tabscanner wins on one thing that matters to a developer evaluating: it runs a genuine free tier of 200 credits every month, not a trial. Taggun offers 30 days and up to 1,000 scans, then stops. If you want to keep a low-volume side project running on a free tier indefinitely, Tabscanner is the only receipt-native vendor here that lets you. Tabscanner’s Enterprise tier advertises “sub-1-cent scans at scale” but publishes no rate behind that claim, so it cannot be compared against anything and is not priced above.
Do you need a receipt-specific API, or will a general one do?
A receipt-specific API earns its keep on the messy inputs: crumpled thermal paper shot at an angle in bad light, line items that wrap, merchant names that appear nowhere in a company registry, and tips written in by hand. Taggun and Tabscanner do nothing else, and that focus is their argument. A general document API — AWS Textract, Google Document AI, ParseRail — treats a receipt as one document type among many and returns a schema you defined.
The question that actually decides it is whether receipts are your only document. If you are building an expense app and will never parse anything else, a receipt-native vendor is a defensible choice. If receipts arrive alongside invoices, bank statements and contracts, running four vendors to cover four document types costs more in integration than any per-receipt rate saves. Nanonets sits in a third position: it bills per block run at $0.02 to $0.30 by complexity rather than per page, which makes it a workflow platform priced like one, and makes a per-receipt comparison against it impossible to state honestly.
Which receipt OCR API has a free tier you can build on?
Three of the seven run a recurring free tier rather than a trial. Tabscanner grants 200 credits every month on its Starter plan. ParseRail grants 500 credits every month, which at six credits a receipt is about 83 receipts, with no card. Veryfi grants 100 documents a month. AWS Textract’s 100 pages a month reads like a free tier but expires after three months, and Nanonets’ $50 of credits is a one-time grant before the $100/month floor starts. Taggun runs a 30-day trial capped at 1,000 scans, and Google’s specialized parsers — the Expense parser included — carry no free tier at all.
The distinction matters more than the number. A trial tells you whether the extraction is good enough. A recurring monthly grant lets a low-traffic product stay in production without a bill, and lets you leave an integration running while you decide.
Methodology
Every price on this page was read from the vendor’s own public pricing page — never from a summary, a reseller, or a remembered figure. Where a vendor does not publish a number, this page publishes none.
Taggun and Tabscanner read fresh on 2026-08-07; Nanonets carried from its 3 August 2026 reading. Taggunpublishes four named plans — Developer $28/month for 500 scans, Startup $99/month for 1,800, Business $399/month for 8,000, and Advanced $799/month for 20,000 — each quoted “billed monthly”, with a 30-day trial capped at 1,000 scans and an unpriced Enterprise tier. Taggun states two per-scan figures for every plan: an “Effective Per Scan Price”, defined as the “average cost per scan when utilising all included scans in your monthly subscription” ($0.056, $0.055, $0.050, $0.040), and an “Over-usage Per Scan Price” for “cost per additional scan after you’ve used all included scans” ($0.060, $0.055, $0.050, $0.040). This page quotes both rather than collapsing them into one rate. Tabscannerpublishes a free Starter tier of 200 credits a month, a $24/month plan carrying 300 credits with excess at $0.08, and a $360/month Business plan carrying 6,000 credits with excess at $0.06; its Enterprise tier is described only as “sub-1-cent scans at scale” with no rate attached, and its $500 Pro Service line publishes no credit allowance, so neither is priced here. Nanonetspublishes a $50 free credit grant with no card, a $100/month floor thereafter, and a per-block-run range of $0.02 to $0.30 by complexity; its Growth and Enterprise tiers are quote-only, advertising “up to 40% volume discount” against prices it does not publish.
Carried from the register. Veryfi’s $0.08/document receipt rate, its $500/month minimum covering fewer than 5,000 documents, and its 100 documents/month free tier were last confirmed against source on 5 August 2026. AWS Textract’s $0.01/page AnalyzeExpense rate and its 100 pages/month free tier for the first three months were re-read on 2026-08-07 and were unchanged. Google Document AI’s Expense parser at $0.10 per count, with one count defined as a document of up to ten pages and no free tier on specialized parsers, was read on 29 July 2026. All three 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.
This page carries no accuracy claims. Cost and packaging are what it compares; how well extraction actually performs is scored in the open at /benchmarks. For invoices and bank statements rather than receipts, see invoice OCR API pricing compared; for which API fits a given job rather than which is cheapest, see the best document extraction APIs in 2026. ParseRail is our product; its rates are the live platform rates, and the receipt endpoint they price is documented at /endpoints/receipt.
$0.06 a receipt. No plan, no minimum, no card.
Post a receipt, get validated JSON back, pay only when it works. 500 free credits land every month. The playground runs against production.