Adobe PDF Services / PDF Extract API vs Unstructured 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.

Unstructured API + MCP

Apache-2.0 library partitions 45+ file types locally at no cost, tagged 11 times since 3 July. No status page, no published rate limits and no SLA.

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

Unstructured API + MCP

1. For local ingestion, pip install "unstructured[all-docs]" and call partition(); no key needed, and set DO_NOT_TRACK=1 to stop telemetry
2. Transform returns 202 with a Location header for long parses; poll it, then pass the parse id as parse_id to Extract
3. Uploaded files expire after 24 hours; keep the original and re-upload on a 404
4. Treat 409 parse_expired and 410 result_expired as a signal to rerun the parse, not to retry
5. Check for an existing job ID before resubmitting, since there's no idempotency key