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Show HN: Open-weight OCR got so cheap I had to share it
This was not supposed to become a product.
When PaddleOCR-VL-1.6 dropped, independent benchmarks put it at the top of document parsing models. I had to try it. I needed a provider, but there simply isn't one ready for production that I would trust.
So i set one up myself. I assumed that even after getting it running, serving a vision-language model would be expensive.
It turns out the opposite is true. Once I had it running properly, the cost was absurdly low. At proper GPU utilization, the cost is only around $1 per 1,000 pages.
The nearest competitors are either much lower quality (Azure Read) or absurdly expensive (Extend or Reducto). Even Mistral OCR 4 which is really good and pretty cheap is still 4x more expensive.
So I had to share it. I made the endpoitns public, and vibe-coded a simple dashboard.
Let me know what you think!
- c4kar 2mo agoHow well handwritten text parsing ??
- TimurKramar 2mo agoWorld class: https://www.paddleocr.ai/main/en/version3.x/algorithm/PaddleOCR-VL/PaddleOCR-VL-1.6.html#3-model-performance https://www.paddleocr.ai/main/en/version3.x/algorithm/Paddle...
- FloatArtifact 2mo agoIt's got the word 'open' everywhere, yet it doesn't show any documentation about self-hosting. Functionally, it might as well be closed-sourced sass using PaddleOCR-VL.
- coulix 2mo agoSpot on..
- saurabhmudradi 2mo agoLol , it's just using an open model underneath to power its OCR & they are just using it to monetize their saas
- TimurKramar 2mo agoThats exactly what it is. Its just an api for PaddleOCR-VL-1.6. I wasn't trying to hide that, im sorry if it came out that way. 'Open' because its just an open-weight model under the hood.
- FloatArtifact 2mo agoI appreciate your reply. So its value really comes down to the cost and not really its openness. You might be thinking, well, it's because it's open that I can have such a low cost, but that's not really what the user thinks when looking at the web page.
- nmatej1 2mo agoI would get it as like - open source models?
- TimurKramar 2mo agoyeah, the value is the price. And its not cheap because its open, its just the cost of running GPUs. Perhaps other providers have similar costs, just 1000% margins on top. this is just pure GPU cost with basically no markup. But being open-weight model, there is no vendor-lockin. if you stop liking the api endpoint, or we were to increase prices, just run the model yourself elsewhere. So in a sense it is open. At least more than openAI or openrouter :)
- greatsage_sh 2mo ago[flagged]
- topaztee 2mo agowhere are you hosting it?
- TimurKramar 2mo agoaws
- desktopentree 2mo ago[flagged]
- Kavita621 2mo ago[flagged]