Adobe PDF Services / PDF Extract API vs Reducto API + MCP

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.

Reducto API + MCP

Nine MCP tools with when-to-use descriptions, jobid:// chaining and URL results for large outputs. Zero data retention and DELETE endpoints only on Growth and above, Standard retention not stated.

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

Reducto API + MCP

1. Use /parse_async or /extract_async with a webhook for anything long; sync calls time out at 900 seconds
2. Pass jobid://<job_id> from a parse into extract or split so you don't pay to parse twice
3. Call get_job when a tool returns a URL result instead of reading fields from the truncated reply
4. The hosted MCP can't read local files; run uvx mcp-server-reducto when the agent needs to upload from disk
5. Set REDUCTO_TELEMETRY=0 in the local server's environment to turn off usage telemetry