PDF to Markdown pricing

Where PDF to Markdown pricing comes from

Most converters charge for every page because every page costs them something: the file is uploaded, a server parses it, and that server is on a bill whether you convert one document or a thousand. Their free tier has to be a quota, so it is — three files a month, five pages a file, ten conversions a day.

This converter starts from the other end. A PDF with a real text layer already contains its own text, and pulling it out is arithmetic a browser does easily. The same is true of a .docx, which is a zip of XML your machine can unpack on its own. Neither one touches our servers, which is why neither one has a quota attached: there is no meter to read.

That leaves exactly one operation that genuinely costs money. When a page has no text layer — a scan, a photographed contract, an image-only export — the characters have to be recognised rather than read, and that means running a model on hardware someone pays for. That page is the only thing this site will ever bill you for.

What the free tier covers

The free tier is drawn around a capability rather than a counter, which is what makes PDF to Markdown pricing here simple to reason about: if your document can be converted locally, it is free — the first one and the ten-thousandth one.

Every text PDF, at any length

There is no page cap and no monthly quota, because a longer document costs your own processor a few more seconds and costs us nothing.

Every .docx file

Word conversion runs entirely in the browser, including the audit that reports which merged cells, equations, and tracked changes the conversion could not carry.

Source links on every block

Page numbers and bounding boxes are part of the conversion, not a paid verification add-on.

All five output profiles

Clean Markdown, Obsidian, GitHub / MkDocs, RAG JSONL, and the source map export are all free, because they are all just different ways of writing out the same local result.

To see what those output profiles produce, compare the output profiles

When you should not pay us anything

A pricing page that only argues for spending money is a sales page. These are the cases where the free tier is the correct answer and a credit pack would be wasted.

You can select the text in your PDF

Open the file in any reader and try to highlight a sentence. If the selection follows the words, the page has a text layer and local conversion will read it. That single test decides whether you ever need OCR.

The document started life in Word

Convert the .docx instead of the PDF that was exported from it. The .docx still carries the headings, list numbering, and table cells that the PDF threw away — and that path is free.

You convert a few documents a month

Batch conversion and a saved library are worth paying for when converting is part of your week. For an occasional file, the free converter does the same job with one extra click.

For the full method of telling those pages apart, read the quality guide

Privacy is not a paid tier here

It is worth being specific about this, because the going rate elsewhere is real. One well-known document API charges 1.25× usage for keeping processing inside the EU, and discounts your bill by 25% if you agree to let it retain your data. Others put zero-retention and a signed data agreement behind enterprise plans that start in the hundreds of dollars per month.

That model is a consequence of running everything server-side: once the file has to be uploaded, where it lands and how long it stays becomes a feature that can be priced. Local conversion removes the question instead of charging for the answer. Nothing is uploaded on the free tier, so there is no retention policy to buy your way out of.

For cloud OCR, the same principle holds in the only form it can: you see exactly which pages need it and approve them individually before anything leaves your device.

How local-first parsing works, see about this converter

Pricing questions