OCR (Tanod Documents)

POST /v1/ocr reads text from an image URL; POST /v1/pdf/ocr adds a text layer to a scanned PDF. Price: /v1/ocr USD 0.0025 per call, with 5 free eligible static renders per IP per UTC day (one pool shared with PDF text, page metadata, security headers, robots.txt, sitemaps and page links); /v1/pdf/ocr USD 0.01 for at most 5 pages, USD 0.02 for 6-10 pages, no free allowance.

Use when

• a PNG, JPEG, WebP, GIF or single-page TIFF image must become text
• a scanned PDF must become searchable before conversion

Use instead

• PDF that already has text: document-to-markdown
• tables from a PDF: pdf-tables (after OCR if scanned)
• scanned PDF to Word: OCR first, then pdf-to-word

Request

JSON body on POST https://tanod.dev/v1/ocr (and /v1/pdf/ocr). Files are sent as a URL or base64 in JSON; these routes do not take multipart/form-data.

/v1/ocr:

• url (required): public http(s) URL of the image, at most 10 MB and 40 megapixels.
• lang: tesseract language code (installed: eng).

/v1/pdf/ocr:

• url or pdf_base64 (at most 10 MB decoded); lang (eng); dpi 100-300 (default 200, at most 200 above 5 pages).
• pages: at most 10 pages, parts N, N-M, -M, last, e.g. 1-3,7.
• skip_text (default true): leave pages that already have text alone.
• output: base64 (default) or url (24-hour link).
• Example: {"url": "https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tests/xhtml/testfiles/resources/pdf/dummy.pdf", "pages": "1", "skip_text": false}

Example body: {"url": "https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/images/eurotext.png", "lang": "eng"}

POST /v1/ocr HTTP/1.1
Host: tanod.dev
content-type: application/json

{"url": "https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/images/eurotext.png", "lang": "eng"}

# free allowance (5 per IP per UTC day), image OCR only

POST /v1/ocr HTTP/1.1
Host: tanod.dev
content-type: application/json
X-Tanod-Free: 1

{"url": "https://tesseract-ocr.github.io/tessdoc/images/eurotext.png", "lang": "eng"}

MCP alternative: connect to https://tanod.dev/mcp and call ocr_image (image) or pdf_ocr (PDF). ocr_image has the 5-per-day free allowance, applied automatically over MCP; pdf_ocr has none.

Payment

An unpaid request returns HTTP 402 with an x402 v2 challenge (USDC on Base, Polygon or Solana) and an MPP/Tempo WWW-Authenticate: Payment challenge. Pay it and repeat the request with the payment attached. No account or API key. Input errors (413, 415, 422) and worker failures (429, 502, 503, 504) are not charged.

Response

/v1/ocr: text, words, confidence_mean, width, height, format, lang, truncated, untrusted_content. /v1/pdf/ocr: file (searchable PDF, base64), text (at most 100,000 characters), text_truncated, ocr_pages, skipped_has_text, lang, dpi, active_content_removed, output_bytes.

Limits

• Images: 10 MB and 40 megapixels; multi-page TIFF is a 422.
• PDFs: at most 10 pages per call (split longer ones), 10 MB as base64 (20 MB via url), output above 15 MB is a 413 output_too_large.
• Only English (eng) is installed.
• Encrypted PDFs are a 422 pdf_encrypted. A call that cannot finish in about 78 s is a 503.