Mindee API vs Unstructured API + MCP

Mindee API

Extracted data kept 12 hours by default (1 to 24 configurable), deletable on fetch, source files never stored. Every call needs a model_id created in the web platform first.

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.

Mindee API

1. Create the model in the Mindee app and store its model_id; the API can't create one for you
2. Enqueue returns 202; poll the job or use a webhook, and keep polling under 1,200 a minute
3. Send Authorization: $MINDEE_API_KEY with no Bearer prefix
4. Turn on confidence scores only when needed, since they cost 1.5 credits a page instead of 1
5. Keep schemas to 25 fields or fewer, the documented recommendation

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