Clairic vs Veryfi 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.

Veryfi API + MCP

Typed fields and line items for receipts, invoices, cheques, bank statements and tax forms. API outage on 29 September and degraded, incomplete extraction on 1 October.

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

Veryfi API + MCP

1. Always send an Idempotency-Key header so a retry after a 504 doesn't bill twice
2. Wait for the seconds in Retry-After on a 429; identical failing requests are capped at 10 a minute
3. Set the CLIENT-ID header on every call
4. Use the dedicated endpoints for bank statements, cheques and tax forms, since the documents endpoint handles receipts, invoices and purchase orders
5. Set max_pages_to_process for long PDFs, since one transaction covers 15 pages