Unstructured API + MCP vs Veryfi API + MCP

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.

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.

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

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