Extend API + MCP vs Unstructured API + MCP

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.

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.

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

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