Clairic vs Unstructured 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.

Unstructured API + MCP

Apache-2.0 library partitions 45+ file types locally at no cost, tagged 11 times since 3 July. No status page, no published rate limits and no SLA.

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

Unstructured API + MCP

1. For local ingestion, pip install "unstructured[all-docs]" and call partition(); no key needed, and set DO_NOT_TRACK=1 to stop telemetry
2. Transform returns 202 with a Location header for long parses; poll it, then pass the parse id as parse_id to Extract
3. Uploaded files expire after 24 hours; keep the original and re-upload on a 404
4. Treat 409 parse_expired and 410 result_expired as a signal to rerun the parse, not to retry
5. Check for an existing job ID before resubmitting, since there's no idempotency key