Amazon Textract vs Reducto 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.

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.

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

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