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The monthly cost of having AI read your documents and a person check the ones it flags, next to doing all of it by hand.
$4 per 1,000 pages. Processors are billed separately, so convert plus extract costs both.
With AI: $760.00 ($40.00 to the vendor, $720.00 for checking). By hand: $6,000.00.
Per document: $0.38 with AI, $3.00 by hand.
10,000 pages. Time to earn back the setup cost: none, there is no setup cost.
Still Building tells one story from the AI world properly, then makes the idea underneath it useful to people doing the work.
Vendor cost is documents times pages per document times the price per page. Checking cost is the number of flagged documents (documents times the share a person checks) times the minutes per check, at the hourly cost. The cost with AI is those two added together. The cost by hand uses the minutes to do one document fully by hand, at the same hourly cost. Savings are the cost by hand minus the cost with AI.
Months to earn back the setup cost are the one-time cost divided by monthly savings. With no setup cost there is nothing to earn back. With zero or negative savings it never pays back.
Preset prices were checked on 2026-09-26. A custom price replaces the preset. LlamaParse, Reducto, Azure Document Intelligence, and Amazon Textract are left out because their pages did not list a dollar-per-page price that day.