Amazon Textract vs Mistral OCR API

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.

Mistral OCR API

Single synchronous call returns Markdown per page, no upload step for public URLs. OCR API at 99.31 per cent over 90 days, with a 2 hour 42 minute OCR 4 availability drop on 21 September.

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

Mistral OCR API

1. Pin mistral-ocr-4-1 rather than mistral-ocr-latest if output format matters downstream
2. Set table_format to html for tables with merged cells
3. Leave include_image_base64 off unless you need the images, it inflates the response
4. Pass pages to OCR only the pages you need, since billing is per page
5. Upload private files through /v1/files and pass the signed URL