Clairic vs Mistral OCR API

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.

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.

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

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