Unstructured Pricing: Cost Per Page and Per 1,000 Pages

Frequently asked questions

How much does Unstructured cost?

Unstructured charges $0.03 per page on Pay As You Go, which is $30 per 1,000 pages, and the price is the same whether you use the Fast, Hi-Res or VLM processing strategy. Every account gets 15,000 free pages a month that reset monthly with no card required. The monthly bill stops at $3,000, and after that pages are free up to 1 million a month. Business, dedicated and in-VPC plans are custom priced.

How much does Unstructured cost per page?

A page costs $0.03 on the Pay As You Go plan, regardless of processing strategy. For PDF, PPTX and TIFF files a page is one page, slide or image. For DOCX files pages come from the document metadata. For every other file type, Unstructured counts a page as the file size divided by 100 KB, so a 1 MB CSV bills as roughly 10 pages no matter how many rows it holds.

Is Unstructured free?

Unstructured gives every account 15,000 free pages every month, and that allowance resets monthly with no card required. That is the most generous renewing free tier in the document-AI category: LlamaParse renews 10,000 credits a month, Reducto grants 15,000 credits once, and Landing AI expires its 1,000 free credits after 90 days. If you process fewer than 15,000 pages a month, Unstructured is effectively free.

What is the Unstructured spend cap?

Unstructured caps the monthly bill at $3,000. You pay $0.03 per page after the free 15,000 pages until the bill reaches $3,000, which happens at 100,000 paid pages, and then every additional page is free up to 1 million pages a month. So your spend never exceeds $3,000 below a million pages. At a full million pages a month, the effective rate works out to about $0.003 per page, or $3 per 1,000 pages. No other document-AI vendor caps spend this way.

Does Unstructured charge more for Hi-Res or VLM processing?

No. Unstructured bills $0.03 per page for every processing strategy, including Fast, Hi-Res and the VLM strategy. This is unusual: most document-AI vendors charge more for the heavier, higher-accuracy path, so a vision-language pass typically costs a multiple of the fast path. On Unstructured, choosing the more accurate strategy does not change the per-page price, only the processing time and output quality.

What is Unstructured used for?

Unstructured is a preprocessing platform that turns any document, PDF, Word file, slide deck, email or image, into clean, structured JSON elements that a large language model can use. It partitions and chunks documents for retrieval-augmented generation and AI agents rather than extracting a fixed schema of business fields. If your goal is to pull named fields like invoice totals or dates into a database, that is a different job than what Unstructured is priced and built for.

Is the $1 per 1,000 pages Unstructured rate still valid?

No. The "$1 per 1,000 pages" figure that circulates in older comparison articles was the early serverless API rate and has been retired. The current published Pay As You Go rate on the Unstructured pricing page is $0.03 per page, which is $30 per 1,000 pages, 30 times the old number. Anyone budgeting on $1 per 1,000 pages is off by a factor of thirty. Always price from the live pricing page.

Is Unstructured cheaper than AWS Textract or Azure?

For plain OCR, no. AWS Textract, Azure AI Document Intelligence and Google Document AI all charge $1.50 per 1,000 pages for text detection, while Unstructured is $30, about 20 times more. But Unstructured is doing a different job: it partitions documents into RAG-ready JSON elements rather than returning raw text. At very high volume the gap narrows, because the $3,000 spend cap drops Unstructured to roughly $3 per 1,000 pages at a million pages a month, close to the hyperscalers volume rates.

How does the free tier compare with paid usage at scale?

The economics reward both ends of the volume curve. Below 15,000 pages a month you pay nothing. Between 15,000 and 100,000 paid pages you pay $0.03 each, so 50,000 paid pages is $1,500. At 100,000 paid pages you hit the $3,000 cap, and from there to a million pages you pay nothing more. The awkward middle is tens of thousands of pages a month, where you are past the free tier but nowhere near the cap.