Amazon Textract vs Extend API + MCP

Amazon Textract

IAM policies limit a credential to single operations, CloudTrail logs every call, and page prices start at $1.50 per 1,000 in US East. Multipage files need S3 and an asynchronous job. Text detection covers six languages. Under the AWS Service Terms AWS may store and use documents to improve the service unless an AI services opt-out policy is set.

Extend API + MCP

Hosted MCP with OAuth scoped to workspaces and to test or production, and a tools filter with nine groups. Parse is billed on top of Extract, Split and Classify, so Performance Extract costs 5 credits a page.

Amazon Textract

1. Sign with SigV4 for service textract at textract.<region>.amazonaws.com, or call aws textract detect-document-text. The AWS CLI can't send image bytes, so reference an S3 object
2. Use StartDocumentTextDetection or StartDocumentAnalysis for any PDF or TIFF of more than one page, pass a ClientRequestToken, then page Get calls with NextToken (1,000 blocks at most each)
3. Fetch results within 7 days of starting a job, or set OutputConfig to write them to your own S3 bucket
4. Request only the FeatureTypes you need. Forms cost $50 per 1,000 pages against $15 for tables or queries in US East
5. Back off on ProvisionedThroughputExceededException (HTTP 400) and ThrottlingException (HTTP 500). Neither carries Retry-After, and default quotas are 1 call a second in most Regions
6. Set the AI services opt-out policy on the AWS organisation before sending customer documents

Extend API + MCP

1. Connect with https://mcp.extend.ai/mcp?tools=parse,extract,files to keep the schema small
2. Every MCP call names a workspace and TEST or PRODUCTION; start in TEST
3. Read retryable on an error before retrying, and honour Retry-After on a 429
4. Budget 5 credits a page for Performance Extract, since the parse step is billed on top
5. Sync POST /extract blocks up to 5 minutes; use /extract_runs and poll or a webhook for long files