Clairic vs Extend API + MCP

Clairic

Clairic's price is public at $0.10 per million input tokens with no output charge, and its docs publish JSON Schemas, limitations and when to use a decision model instead. It is a preview that Cloudflare calls an early checkpoint, served under an unversioned ID with no SLA, and its promised open weights have no date or licence.

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.

Clairic

1. Send model as clairic in the body as well as in the URL. The input schema requires model and fields
2. Set reference_date, or add a line giving today's date to the state, for any field that depends on the current date
3. Treat a null value as not found, and read p_null, confidence or the 80% interval before acting. Typed output is well formed, not necessarily correct
4. Extract the inputs and do multi-step sums and table totals in code. Cloudflare says long arithmetic chains aren't reliable yet
5. Embed images as data URLs or base64 objects, at most four, 4 MiB each and 8 MiB in all. Remote image URLs are refused
6. Read the internal code on a 429. 3036 means the day's 10,000 free neurons are spent, 3040 means capacity, so retry later

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