Is AWS Textract free? What it actually costs in 2026
Yes, there is a free tier — with limits.
Per-page usage pricing that varies sharply by feature: plain text detection is around $1.50 per 1,000 pages, while table and form analysis runs closer to $15–$65 per 1,000 pages depending on the combination, with volume tiers. A free tier covers the first months at low volume. The feature multiplier is what surprises people — the analysis you actually need is ten to forty times the price of the OCR you were quoting.
When paying is still the right call
Stay for the specialised document types, where Textract's purpose-built models for invoices, receipts and identity documents are meaningfully ahead of anything general-purpose — if you are processing expense claims at volume, that gap is the product. Stay if you are already on AWS and the compliance story matters more than the per-page cost, particularly where a signed BAA or an existing data-processing agreement already covers it. Stay for handwriting, which remains genuinely hard and where the managed services still lead. And stay at low, steady volume where the bill is noise. The tools below are for corpus ingestion, iteration-heavy work, and documents that cannot leave your network.
What you are locked into
Low. Extraction is stateless: document in, structured output out. Nothing accumulates. What needs rewriting is the parsing code that consumes Textract's specific block-and-relationship JSON, which is more idiosyncratic than most — the alternatives here emit Markdown or simpler structures, so the consuming code usually gets shorter. Budget days.
If you would rather not pay: Docling
Docling
IBM's document converter. Layout-aware PDF to clean Markdown, MIT.
Free, MIT. Runs on your own hardware, CPU or GPU.
See all 5 AWS Textract alternatives comparedCompare the free options head-to-head
Pricing is verified against the vendor's published figures and dated above. Vendors change prices — confirm current numbers with Amazon Web Services before you commit. More document ai & ocr decisions on Macrostack.