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!

Show HN: Open-weight OCR got so cheap I had to share it
openparser.dev

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.

Lol , it's just using an open model underneath to power its OCR & they are just using it to monetize their saas

[flagged]

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.