OCR.Space free tier includes Free OCR API that parses image and PDF files and returns the text as JSON: 25,000 requests/month… Verified October 2026. Compare with 3 alternatives in AI / ML.

OCR.Space Free Tier 2026

caution

Why caution: effective between 2026-10-03 and 2026-10-30 — By October 30, 2026, OCR.Space's free OCR API plan includes 1,000 Engine 3 conversions a month, down from 2,500 on October 3. Engine 1 is retired, and OCR.Space redirects calls to it to Engine 2. The 25,000 monthly requests for Engines 1 and 2 are unchanged. Source ↗ Full history ↓

A verdict here is not a fixed property of the vendor. A one-off pricing event demotes a vendor while its recorded date falls in the last 180 days and then lapses on its own, with nothing about the vendor having changed; a standing condition — a free tier withdrawn and not restored, a product retired — does not lapse with time. This one rests on a record effective between 2026-10-03 and 2026-10-30, so it lapses on 2027-04-29 unless we record something new first.

Subtypes in AI / ML: document_extraction — turns a document or a scan into text or structured fields. We read that on 2026-09-01 from https://ocr.space/, where it says: “Web API to extract text from images and convert scans to searchable PDF” How we use this.

Limits, pricing history, and 3 alternatives. Verified October 2026. Last updated 2026-10-31.

OCR.Space's free tier offers Free OCR API that parses image and PDF files and returns the text as JSON: 25,000 requests/month, 1 MB file size limit… We rate it caution — one recorded limit reduction, effective between 2026-10-03 and 2026-10-30. Best for ai / ml workloads.

One of 89 AI / ML services we track. See our full AI / ML Free Tier Comparison →

Tier

Free

Free Tier Details

Free OCR API that parses image and PDF files and returns the text as JSON: 25,000 requests/month, 1 MB file size limit, 3-page PDF limit, 500 requests/day per IP address, plus 1,000 Engine 3 conversions/month, down from 2,500 in October 2026. Engine 1 is retired; OCR.Space redirects calls to it to Engine 2. Free-tier searchable PDFs carry a watermark. PRO is $30/month for 300,000 requests and 5 MB files. The online OCR web form needs no registration and accepts files up to 5MB.

We read that on 2026-10-31 from https://ocr.space/ocrapi, and our check recorded: the page names OCR.Space as "ocr space" and states "$30" and "500 requests per day".

From ocr.space/ocrapi, read 2026-10-31:

The free OCR API plan has a rate limit of 500 requests per day per IP address to prevent accidental spamming.

When You'll Outgrow OCR.Space's Free Tier

At 25,000 requests/mo, you'll need to upgrade.
At that point, the 3 alternatives in AI / ML are each listed with the free tier they offer, so you can compare what they give you against what you have outgrown.

Pricing Change History (2 recorded)

reduced effective between 2026-10-03 and 2026-10-30 medium impact

By October 30, 2026, OCR.Space's free OCR API plan includes 1,000 Engine 3 conversions a month, down from 2,500 on October 3. Engine 1 is retired, and OCR.Space redirects calls to it to Engine 2. The 25,000 monthly requests for Engines 1 and 2 are unchanged. Source ↗

Before: "Free plan: 2,500 Engine 3 conversions in addition to the 25,000 for Engine 1/2" and "Engine 1 is our original OCR engine. It is deprecated and gets retired." (ocr.space/ocrapi, Internet Archive 2026-10-03)

After: "Free plan: 1000 Engine 3 conversions in addition to the 25,000 for Engine 1/2" and "Engine 1 is our original OCR engine. It has served us well and is now retired ... Calls to Engine 1 are automatically redirected to Engine 2." (ocr.space/ocrapi, read 2026-10-30)

corrected recorded 2026-08-28 · corrected 2026-10-02 low impact

Data correction - Not a change by OCR.Space. An Internet Archive copy of its page from 2026-03-02 already states the terms this record called new, and our listing of 2026-03-02 did not match them. Our re-read of 2026-08-28 recorded the difference as a change. Source ↗

Before: An OCR API parses image and pdf files that return the text results in JSON format. 25,000 requests per month are free and a 1MB file size limit.

After: The free tier has a file size limit of 5MB per document.

View all 513 pricing changes across all vendors →

Alternatives in AI / ML

How OCR.Space compares against every one of the 3 we list, not against a selection of them. A surface with room for every member of a tied set may rotate their order. A surface with room for only some of them names none of them, because which ones it named would be the claim, and a claim seeded on the date is not the one we serve tomorrow. How we decide this.

Service	Free Tier	Stability
OCR.Space	Free	caution
Parseur	Free 20 free pages/month: Extract data from PDFs, emails. AI powered.	stable
Cohere	Free AI model API for Command chat models, Embed, Rerank, Transcribe and Parse. Every account starts with a Trial API key: calls made with it are free and limited to 1,000 API calls a month.	stable
Reducto	Free Turn any unstructured documents (PDF, XLSX, JPG, PPTX, etc.) into structured JSON data.	unrated

Left out of this list: Hugging Face (shares no subtype with this product), Groq (shares no subtype with this product), Google Gemini API (shares no subtype with this product), Mistral AI (shares no subtype with this product), OpenRouter (shares no subtype with this product), Cloudflare Workers AI (shares no subtype with this product), Cerebras (shares no subtype with this product), Brave Search API (shares no subtype with this product), OpenAI (shares no subtype with this product), Pinecone (shares no subtype with this product), Qdrant (shares no subtype with this product), Deepgram (shares no subtype with this product), Kaggle (shares no subtype with this product), Roboflow (shares no subtype with this product), Scale AI (shares no subtype with this product), AssemblyAI (shares no subtype with this product), Replicate (shares no subtype with this product), Baseten (shares no subtype with this product), Weights & Biases (shares no subtype with this product), Comet ML (shares no subtype with this product), Clarifai (we have not classified this record), Neptune.ai (we have not classified this record), Labelbox (shares no subtype with this product), Google Colab (shares no subtype with this product), Composio (shares no subtype with this product), DeepAR (none of this category's subtypes apply), Maxim AI (shares no subtype with this product), SerpApi (shares no subtype with this product), Tavily AI (shares no subtype with this product), paperspace (shares no subtype with this product), Arize AX (shares no subtype with this product), Audio Enhancer (none of this category's subtypes apply), Braintrust (shares no subtype with this product), Clair (none of this category's subtypes apply), Keywords AI (shares no subtype with this product), Langfuse (shares no subtype with this product), LangSmith (shares no subtype with this product), Langtrace (we have not classified this record), LangWatch (shares no subtype with this product), Lumenfall.ai (shares no subtype with this product), Mediaworkbench.ai (none of this category's subtypes apply), Othor AI (none of this category's subtypes apply), Pollinations.AI (shares no subtype with this product), Portkey (shares no subtype with this product), ReportGPT (none of this category's subtypes apply), Zenable (none of this category's subtypes apply), xAI (shares no subtype with this product), Anthropic API (shares no subtype with this product), GitHub Models (shares no subtype with this product), NVIDIA NIM (shares no subtype with this product), Ollama Cloud (shares no subtype with this product), LLM7.io (shares no subtype with this product), SiliconFlow (shares no subtype with this product), Zhipu AI (shares no subtype with this product), DeepSeek API (shares no subtype with this product), MiniMax (shares no subtype with this product), Exa (shares no subtype with this product), GPU-Bridge (we have not classified this record), Google Vertex AI Agent Engine (we have not classified this record), Google Vector Search 2.0 (shares no subtype with this product), Google Gemini Embedding 2 (shares no subtype with this product), Alibaba Cloud Qwen Code (none of this category's subtypes apply), E2B (shares no subtype with this product), Together AI (shares no subtype with this product), Fireworks AI (shares no subtype with this product), Modal (shares no subtype with this product), ElevenLabs (we have not classified this record), Stability AI (we have not classified this record), Daytona (shares no subtype with this product), Blaxel (shares no subtype with this product), Novita Sandbox (shares no subtype with this product), Runloop (shares no subtype with this product), Mem0 (shares no subtype with this product), Zep (shares no subtype with this product), Letta (we have not classified this record), Supermemory (shares no subtype with this product), Cognee (shares no subtype with this product), Serper (shares no subtype with this product), Linkup (shares no subtype with this product), Parallel (shares no subtype with this product), Jina AI (shares no subtype with this product), You.com (shares no subtype with this product), Hetzner Inference API (shares no subtype with this product), Cloudflare AI Search (we have not classified this record), Valyu (shares no subtype with this product). Each is still listed in AI / ML, with the vendor's own words we read that from on its page. How we decide this.

See full comparison →

Recompute today's order yourself. The order above is a permutation seeded only on the UTC date and the query key — no vendor name, slug, id or offer field is an input. The list above is every one of the 3 entries in that order, not a prefix of it. The algorithm is published, so anyone can reproduce this page's order without asking us.

date: 2026-11-14
query_key: alternatives:AI / ML:OCR.Space
seed: ad89ae12405ebb0a981b11c668da423ecf43b907d5a5f68fa588d9e4e00978b9
tie_count: 2

Watch OCR.Space for Pricing Changes

We do not push notifications. Every change we record is readable the moment it lands, and the JSON answer carries an ETag — send it back as If-None-Match and an unchanged answer costs one 304.

curl https://agentdeals.dev/api/changes?vendor=OCR.Space
curl https://agentdeals.dev/pricing-changes/feed.xml?vendor=OCR.Space

API docs →

Frequently Asked Questions

Is OCR.Space free?

Yes, OCR.Space offers a free tier: Free. Free OCR API that parses image and PDF files and returns the text as JSON: 25,000 requests/month, 1 MB file size limit, 3-page PDF limit, 500 requests/day per IP address, plus 1,000 Engine 3 conversio...

What is OCR.Space's free tier?

OCR.Space's free tier is called "Free". Free OCR API that parses image and PDF files and returns the text as JSON: 25,000 requests/month, 1 MB file size limit, 3-page PDF limit, 500 requests/day per IP address, plus 1,000 Engine 3 conversions/month, down from 2,500 in October 2026. Engine 1 is retired; OCR.Space redirects calls to it to Engine 2. Free-tier searchable PDFs carry a watermark. PRO is $30/month for 300,000 requests and 5 MB files. The online OCR web form needs no registration and accepts files up to 5MB.

Is OCR.Space's free tier reliable?

OCR.Space's free tier requires caution because of one specific recorded change, effective between 2026-10-03 and 2026-10-30: By October 30, 2026, OCR.Space's free OCR API plan includes 1,000 Engine 3 conversions a month, down from 2,500 on October 3. Engine 1 is retired, and OCR.Space redirects calls to it to Engine 2. The 25,000 monthly requests for Engines 1 and 2 are unchanged. Source: https://ocr.space/ocrapi

Is OCR.Space's free tier good for production?

OCR.Space's free tier is usable for prototyping and development, but we rate it caution because of one recorded limit reduction, effective between 2026-10-03 and 2026-10-30. Consider alternatives with more stable pricing for critical services.

What changed in OCR.Space's pricing?

OCR.Space has had 1 recorded pricing change. Most recently: By October 30, 2026, OCR.Space's free OCR API plan includes 1,000 Engine 3 conversions a month, down from 2,500 on October 3. Engine 1 is retired, and OCR.Space redirects calls to it to Engine 2. The 25,000 monthly requests for Engines 1 and 2 are unchanged. Source: https://ocr.space/ocrapi (effective between 2026-10-03 and 2026-10-30).

What are the best free alternatives to OCR.Space?

We publish no ranking of these. Nothing we record measures popularity or generosity, so naming a best or a top few would be our preference rather than our data. We hold 3 free alternatives to OCR.Space in AI / ML, each listed above with its tier. Of those, 2 carry no recorded demerit and are indistinguishable under every signal we hold, so they are listed in an order that rotates daily, 1 is demoted with the reason named. Our ranking rule is published at /criteria.

When will I outgrow OCR.Space's free tier?

At 25,000 requests/mo, you'll need to upgrade. When you outgrow the free tier, evaluate paid plans against alternatives — sometimes a competitor's free tier covers what you need.

What category is OCR.Space in?

OCR.Space is categorized under AI / ML on AgentDeals. We list 3 other AI / ML services alongside it, every one of them on this page with its free tier and the stability we publish for it.