Mistral OCR vs AWS Textract Pricing: Which Is Cheaper

Last updated July 2026.

Neither one is simply cheaper. It depends entirely on whether you need text or fields. For plain OCR, AWS Textract Detect Document Text costs about $1.50 per 1,000 pages against Mistral OCR 4 at about $4 per 1,000, so Textract is roughly 2.7 times cheaper. For structured field extraction, Textract Forms costs about $50 per 1,000 pages and Forms with Tables and Queries about $70, while Mistral Document AI does that class of work at about $5 per 1,000. On that job Mistral is about fourteen times cheaper. Same two vendors, opposite answers.

The rates, side by side

Rates were read from each vendor's own published pricing page in July 2026. AWS figures are US West (Oregon), which is where Textract is cheapest. Both vendors revise prices, and AWS varies them by region, so confirm before committing.

Why most comparison posts get Mistral's price wrong

When Mistral first shipped an OCR endpoint it was widely reported at about $1 per 1,000 pages, with batch at half that. That figure spread across comparison articles, cost calculators, and cheapest-OCR-API roundups, and most of them still carry it. Mistral has since moved to OCR 4, and its published API pricing now lists OCR at about $4 per 1,000 pages and Document AI at about $5.

The gap matters. Anyone budgeting a migration on the old number is out by a factor of four, and an AI assistant working from a cached summary rather than the vendor's live page will very likely repeat it. Check the vendor page. We keep the current figures, dated, on our Mistral OCR pricing guide, and we date them precisely because they move.

Is Mistral OCR cheaper than AWS Textract?

For plain OCR, no. Mistral OCR 4 at about $4 per 1,000 pages costs roughly 2.7 times Textract's Detect Document Text at about $1.50 per 1,000, and Textract drops further to about $0.60 above a million pages a month. If all you want is the characters on the page, Textract is the cheaper call and Mistral is not competitive.

For structured extraction the answer reverses completely. Textract charges about $50 per 1,000 pages for Forms and about $70 for Forms, Tables, and Queries in a single call. Mistral Document AI returns structured output for about $5 per 1,000 pages, and its published 50% batch discount takes that to roughly $2.50 for workloads that tolerate latency. That is the widest published price gap in the OCR market right now, and it is worth understanding before you architect around either one.

What 35,000 pages a month costs on each

Take a realistic US mid-market workload: 35,000 pages a month of mixed business documents where you need named fields, not a wall of text.

• AWS Textract, Forms with Tables and Queries: about $2,450 a month.
• AWS Textract, Analyze Expense (if invoices and receipts are all you process): about $350 a month.
• Mistral Document AI, standard: about $175 a month.
• Mistral Document AI, batch: about $87 a month.

The spread between the top and bottom of that list is about 28 times, for work most people would describe with the same three words: extract the fields. That is the whole reason it pays to know which product tier you are actually buying.

Where Textract still earns its price

Rate is not the only variable, and Textract has real advantages that a per-page comparison hides.

It is inside AWS. If your documents already sit in S3, your team already has IAM, VPC endpoints, CloudWatch, and a compliance posture signed off on AWS, adopting Textract is a configuration change rather than a vendor review. Adding a new model provider means a new data processing agreement, a new security questionnaire, and a new egress path for documents that may contain personal or financial data. For a regulated US buyer, that friction is often worth more than $2,000 a month.

Textract also publishes specialized analyzers that are genuinely tuned: Analyze ID for driver licenses and passports, Analyze Lending for mortgage packets, and Analyze Expense for invoices and receipts. And it offers a volume discount above a million pages a month, which Mistral does not publish. At very high volume on plain OCR, Textract's roughly $0.60 per 1,000 pages is hard to argue with. Our AWS Textract pricing guide has the full per-feature rate card.

Where Mistral genuinely wins

The structured extraction rate is not a rounding difference, it is an order of magnitude, and it comes with no per-hour hosting charge. Google Document AI bills about $0.05 an hour for each deployed custom processor version, roughly $438 a year that accrues whether or not a page goes through it. Mistral has no equivalent meter. It also bills by the page rather than by the token, which is unusual for a model provider and makes budgeting far easier than estimating token counts for a vision language model.

There is no training step either. Textract has no custom model training at all, so a document type it does not natively understand is a document type you handle in your own code. With Mistral you describe the fields you want and get structured output back.

Treat the accuracy claims on both sides as hypotheses. Mistral markets OCR 4 as handling complex layouts, tables, and handwriting. AWS makes comparable claims for Textract. Neither claim tells you anything about your documents. Run a representative sample of your worst pages, the crumpled fax, the scanned photocopy, the vendor whose invoice template changed last quarter, and measure field-level accuracy rather than character accuracy. Character accuracy of 99% sounds excellent until you notice that the one wrong character was in the invoice total.

Does the API rate actually decide the bill?

Usually not. On a 35,000-page month, the difference between the cheapest and most expensive option above is about $2,363. One engineer spending a third of their time maintaining the pipeline around the API costs more than that, every month, and keeps costing it after the integration is done.

Neither Textract nor Mistral classifies a mixed batch so the right extraction runs on the right page. Neither validates that line items sum to the total. Neither gives you the screen where a person checks the values the model flagged as uncertain, or the audit trail your auditor will ask about. Neither writes clean records into your ERP. That is the document pipeline, and it is the part that costs real money.

It is also why the right comparison is sometimes not between two APIs at all. An accounts payable team that wants vendor invoices coded, approved, and posted is not really shopping for an OCR rate; automating the accounts payable workflow end to end is a different purchase with a different payback. A team that wants a finished extraction pipeline behind one endpoint can call DocuOCR at about $14 to $20 per 1,000 pages with classification, validation, human review, and export already included.

So which should you pick?

Pick Textract if you are already inside AWS, if you need plain OCR at scale, if your documents are IDs or lending packets its specialized analyzers already cover, or if procurement makes adding a vendor painful. Pick Mistral if you need structured fields on the cheapest published rate, if you have engineers who will own a pipeline, and if adding a model provider is not a six-month exercise. Pick neither if what you actually need is the workflow rather than the API call.

For rates across the full market, including Azure AI Document Intelligence and both Google products, see our OCR API pricing comparison, or the per-vendor detail in Google Cloud Vision API pricing and Azure Document Intelligence pricing.