The Cheapest Document Extraction API in 2026 Is Not a Traditional OCR Brand

Based on the public pricing sheets checked on March 15, 2026 in our broader AI token pricing comparison, the short answer is straightforward: Mistral OCR 3 is the standout current answer in the comparison.

That does not make this the universal best buy. It makes it the cleanest answer to one narrow question: which current document extraction row is cheapest and easiest to reuse elsewhere. That distinction matters because a lot of teams still confuse the cheapest model row with the cheapest production stack.

The short answer

Mistral OCR 3 is priced at $2 per 1,000 pages, and OCR 3 Annotated is $3 per 1,000 pages. In the current public comparison, that is one of the clearest low-cost rows for document extraction as a standalone product, not just as a side effect of retrieval.

That distinction matters. A lot of vendors can “work with documents,” but many of them are really selling provider-managed retrieval layers. OCR that returns plain text, markdown, tables, or JSON is much easier to reuse elsewhere.

The pricing rows that matter

Product	Price	What you get
Mistral OCR 3	$2 per 1,000 pages	Portable document extraction.
Mistral OCR 3 Annotated	$3 per 1,000 pages	Annotated OCR output.
OpenAI / Google / AWS document workflows	Varies	Often bundled with retrieval or hosted file search.

If your job is to pull structure out of files and move that structure elsewhere, cheap portable OCR is more valuable than a retrieval system that quietly locks the useful state inside the provider.

Why the headline can mislead

Cheap OCR is not the same as cheap document workflow. If you also need search, indexing, reranking, and agentic follow-up, the bill can expand beyond the extraction row very quickly.

You also need to separate extraction accuracy from extraction price. The cheapest page rate still needs to be good enough on the file types you actually care about.

When this is the right pick

• you want reusable text, tables, or JSON from documents
• you want to keep retrieval under your own control
• you need a clean per-page OCR product rather than a managed document stack

When to ignore the headline

• you mainly want hosted search over files, not extraction itself
• you are comparing OCR rows as if they include retrieval for free
• your workflow value comes from provider-native document state

Bottom line

If the question is cheap, portable document extraction, Mistral OCR 3 is one of the strongest current answers. If the question is a full document platform, that headline needs more qualifications.

If you want the wider market context, start with the full provider-by-provider pricing breakdown and, for media-specific workloads, the separate image and video generation API comparison.