Adobe PDF Services / PDF Extract API vs Veryfi 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.

Veryfi API + MCP

Typed fields and line items for receipts, invoices, cheques, bank statements and tax forms. API outage on 29 September and degraded, incomplete extraction on 1 October.

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

Veryfi API + MCP

1. Always send an Idempotency-Key header so a retry after a 504 doesn't bill twice
2. Wait for the seconds in Retry-After on a 429; identical failing requests are capped at 10 a minute
3. Set the CLIENT-ID header on every call
4. Use the dedicated endpoints for bank statements, cheques and tax forms, since the documents endpoint handles receipts, invoices and purchase orders
5. Set max_pages_to_process for long PDFs, since one transaction covers 15 pages