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Show HN: Open-weight OCR got so cheap I had to share it (openparser.dev)
17 points by TimurKramar 8 days ago
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!

3 comments

It'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.
Thats 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.
I 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.
yeah, 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 :)

I would get it as like - open source models?
Lol , it's just using an open model underneath to power its OCR & they are just using it to monetize their saas
Spot on..
How well handwritten text parsing ??
where are you hosting it?
aws