What a real invoice costs: 4 documents, measured
An invoice, a bank statement, a receipt and a contract priced from real API usage, per token, next to Reducto, Mindee, Veryfi and Nanonets rates. Cost only, with the caveats.
4 min readA pricing page tells you a rate. It does not tell you what one invoice costs. This post prices four real documents, an invoice, a bank statement, a receipt and a contract, from the usage the Veralens API reported for each job, and sets the invoice, receipt and contract next to what four other vendors charge for the same files.
How we measured
We ran the four sample documents through the Veralens API, the invoice, receipt and contract on 2026-10-11 and the bank statement on 2026-10-18. They are the same files you can open on the samples page: a 2 page invoice PDF with 20 line items, a 2 page bank statement PDF with 25 transactions, a 1 page receipt photo and a 1 page contract PDF. Each job asked for structured JSON against a schema, once on each engine. Every job returned its own inputTokens, outputTokens and cost, and the figures below are those numbers, not an estimate.
Veralens bills per token at published rates: vera-1.0-high is $1.75 per million input tokens and $4.00 per million output tokens, and vera-1.0-low is $0.50 and $2.00.
What each document cost
The bank statement is the dearest because it has the most to write out: 25 transactions, each with a date, a reference, an amount and a running balance, is 2,163 output tokens, and output is the expensive side of the bill. It has the same page count as the invoice and fewer input tokens, yet costs about half as much again. The contract is the cheapest because it is one short page. A longer or denser document costs more, a shorter one costs less, and nothing else moves the price. There is no page definition and no per field charge.
The invoice, receipt and contract at other vendors
Rates below are from each vendor's own pricing page, read on 2026-10-18. Where a vendor bills per page we multiplied by the page count of the file. Competitor columns use the cheapest published tier that covers a single document. The bank statement is left out here because it was added to the samples later and we have not checked each vendor's bank statement rates.
Sources: Reducto pricing, Mindee pricing (in US dollars, credits cost $0.054 each on the 6,000 credit annual Starter plan, plus a $29 a month platform fee, and one page is one credit), Veryfi pricing (invoices $0.16, receipts $0.08, per document up to 15 pages, with a $500 a month minimum on the entry plan) and Nanonets pricing (billed per block run at $0.02, $0.10 and $0.30, and their page says a typical invoice workflow runs 4 to 6 blocks).
On these three files the gap is roughly 5 to 7 times against Reducto, 14 to 20 times against Mindee, 20 times or more against Veryfi, and 11 to 240 times against Nanonets for an invoice, depending on which blocks its workflow runs.
Read this table with care
The sample files are synthetic. They are generated documents with invented names, so they are clean. A coffee stained scan with a skewed photo will use more input tokens. Run your own files before you trust any number here, ours or anyone's.
This is cost, not accuracy. We are not claiming that every vendor in the table returns the same fields with the same quality. We have not measured that and this post does not say it.
Some comparisons are not like for like. Mindee and Veryfi are built around fixed document types with fields they define for you. Veralens takes your own schema. Mistral OCR charges about $0.001 a page, which is cheaper than us, but it returns text, not typed fields. If plain text is all you need, use it and save the money.
Monthly minimums change the maths. Veryfi and Mindee price through monthly plans, so a low volume month costs more per document than the table shows. Veralens is prepaid from $5 with no monthly fee, and there is no free balance.
Rates move. The Veralens rates are the ones above on 2026-10-11 and 2026-10-18, and the vendor rates were read on 2026-10-18. This market reprices often.
What decides your own cost
Output tokens, almost entirely. Ask for the fields you need, not everything on the page, and the bill follows. For plain documents, choose the vera-1.0-low engine: on the four files above it cost less than half of the default price. For the long version of the page by page argument, read what a page really costs and what counts as a page.
Check it on your own invoice
Add $5 in Billing, create a key and follow the quickstart. Every response carries the token counts and the cost of that one job, so you can price your own invoice the same way we priced ours. If you are leaving a per document vendor, the Veryfi alternative post covers that switch.