Adobe PDF Services / PDF Extract API vs OpenDocRouter

Adobe PDF Services / PDF Extract API

Public OpenAPI 3.0.1 spec covering Extract, PDF to Markdown and 20 other operations. No published paid price, paid use goes through sales.

OpenDocRouter

One endpoint reaches 11 parsing models, each with a dated recipe version, a published token price and a ParseBench score, and failed pages aren't charged. The service launched on 7 October 2026, so it has no status page, incident history, SLA or changelog yet, and no key scopes were found in the reviewed documentation.

Adobe PDF Services / PDF Extract API

1. Cache the access token and reuse it until it expires
2. Budget 1 Document Transaction per 5 pages for Extract and PDF to Markdown, so 500 free transactions cover about 2,500 pages
3. Pass notifiers with a callback URL instead of polling the job status
4. Use pdf-services-ew1.adobe.io when documents must stay in the EU
5. Check /operation/pdfproperties first, since copy-protected PDFs fail Extract with DISQUALIFIED_PERMISSIONS

OpenDocRouter

1. Call GET /v1/models first, which needs no key, and choose a model by avg_charge_per_page_usd and its ParseBench scores. Send its id as model
2. Send cache: true on any request you might repeat. Without it the markdown exists only in the POST response and a resend is charged as a new request
3. Raise the SDK timeout above its 60-second default for sync parses. Pages can run for 270 seconds and the SDKs retry a timed-out request twice
4. Check every page's status before using its markdown. A 200 can be partial, and failed pages can be resent alone with pages
5. Treat 402 as final until credit is added. The hold is the model's maximum charge per page times the page count, and GET /v1/credits shows available_usd