AWS Textract vs Google Document AI Pricing: Cost per 1,000 Invoice Pages

Last updated September 2026

Short answer: for ordinary one and two page supplier invoices, AWS Textract is dramatically cheaper. Textract Analyze Expense bills $10 per 1,000 pages, so a two page invoice costs two cents. Google Document AI's Invoice Parser bills $0.10 per document of up to ten pages, so that same two page invoice costs ten cents, five times more. Run 5,000 invoices a month and the difference is $500 against $100. The usual claim that Google is the cheaper option comes from comparing the wrong meters, and it reverses the moment you price a real accounts payable workload.

Both rate cards below were pulled fresh in September 2026: Textract from the AWS Price List API for us-east-1, which is the only reliable source now that the public Textract pricing page renders unresolved template tokens instead of prices, and Google Document AI from its own pricing documentation.

Why the comparison usually gets this backwards

Almost every comparison article puts Google's Layout Parser at $10 per 1,000 pages next to Textract's forms and tables analysis at $65 or $70 per 1,000 pages, concludes Google wins by a factor of six, and stops there. Both numbers are real. Neither is the number you should be paying for invoices.

Textract has a purpose built invoice and receipt meter called Analyze Expense, and it costs $10 per 1,000 pages, not $70. It returns vendor, invoice number, dates, tax, totals and line items as typed fields. If you are running invoices through Forms plus Tables on Textract, you are paying seven times the correct rate for a worse result. That single misconfiguration is the most expensive mistake in this whole category, and it is the mistake that most published comparisons quietly assume you are making.

On Google's side the trap is the unit. The specialized processors, Invoice Parser included, are not billed per page. They are billed per document, in blocks of ten pages. Google's own worked examples say it plainly: a document of 1 to 10 pages costs $0.10, a document of 11 to 20 pages costs $0.20, and a document of 91 to 100 pages costs $1.00. A one page invoice and a ten page invoice cost exactly the same.

AWS Textract pricing, per 1,000 pages

These are the us-east-1 on demand rates from the AWS Price List API, price list version 20260831092230. Synchronous and asynchronous processing are priced identically for every feature. The volume break is at 1,000,000 pages per month, except Analyze ID which breaks at 100,000.

Textract has no free tier on these rates beyond the standard AWS twelve month trial, no commitment discount, and no reserved capacity option. What you see is what everyone pays. The full breakdown of every meter, including the combinations, sits on our AWS Textract pricing page.

Google Document AI pricing, September 2026

Google splits its catalogue into general processors billed per 1,000 pages and specialized pretrained processors billed per document block. Mixing the two units is where most cost models go wrong.

Two things on that table are worth knowing before you build a model around it. Enterprise Document OCR is genuinely free for the first 1,000 pages every month, which Textract does not match. And Google offers a Gemini Enterprise Flexible Savings Plan that cuts every Document AI rate by 10 percent on a one year commitment and 20 percent on three years, so the Invoice Parser drops to $0.09 and then $0.08 per document. You have to opt in to the consumption model to get it. Nothing equivalent exists on Textract. Our Google Document AI pricing page carries the rest of the catalogue.

Which is cheaper for invoices, AWS Textract or Google Document AI?

Textract, by a wide margin, unless your invoices are unusually long. Because Google charges a flat $0.10 for anything up to ten pages, its effective cost per page falls the longer the document gets, while Textract charges the same cent per page whatever the length. The crossover sits at exactly ten pages.

Google's price per page is a sawtooth. It touches Textract's rate exactly at each multiple of ten pages and is worse everywhere in between, worst of all at one page, where it is ten times higher. US supplier invoices are overwhelmingly one or two pages. That is why the real world answer is Textract, and why it does not depend on which vendor you happen to like.

What 5,000 invoices a month actually costs on each

Take a mid sized AP department: 5,000 vendor invoices a month, averaging 1.6 pages each, so 8,000 pages. Header fields plus line items required.

The spread between the cheapest correct configuration and the most expensive incorrect one is seven times, on identical documents, at the same vendor. Getting the meter right matters more than getting the vendor right.

Where Google Document AI is the better buy

Three cases, and they are real ones. First, long documents: anything reliably above ten pages per file makes Google's block pricing competitive, and its 200 page per document batch ceiling is generous. Second, low volume: the first 1,000 Enterprise Document OCR pages each month are free, every month, which is a genuinely useful development allowance. Third, document classes Textract has no processor for, where Google ships pretrained parsers for bank statements at $0.75 per document, pay slips and W2s at $0.30, and utility bills at $0.10.

That last point cuts both ways. Both catalogues only cover the document families the vendor chose to train, and neither has a processor for the long tail of business paperwork. Contracts are the obvious gap: if what you actually need read is a stack of commercial leases rather than invoices, that is its own extraction problem with its own tooling, and pushing lease PDFs through an invoice parser returns nothing useful at any price.

What neither price includes

Both figures are raw API costs and both exclude everything around the API. Neither gives you a review screen for low confidence fields, a validation layer that catches a total which does not match the line items, retry handling, a vendor exception queue, an audit trail, or an export in the column order your accounting system expects. That is anywhere from two to eight weeks of engineering plus permanent maintenance, and on a 5,000 invoice a month workload it costs far more than the $960 or $6,000 of inference.

This is why the API rate is usually the wrong thing to optimize. A finished extraction tool that includes the review workflow and the spreadsheet export routinely beats a self built pipeline on total cost until you are well into six figure page volumes, even though its headline price per document looks higher. Teams inside an ERP hit a different version of the same wall, where the native capture feature is included but capped: Acumatica, for instance, allows just fifty recognition pages a month before it blocks you, which we broke down in full on our Acumatica AP Document Recognition pricing page.

How to decide in ten minutes

Pull twenty real invoices from your worst three vendors and count the pages. If the average is under five, Textract Analyze Expense wins on cost and it is not close. If it is above ten, price both and let the block rounding decide. Then, before you write a line of code, run those same twenty invoices through a finished extraction tool and check whether the line items come back correctly, because accuracy on the table rows is where these pipelines actually fail, and no rate card tells you anything about it. If you want the wider field, our comparison of AWS Textract against Azure Document Intelligence covers the third major cloud option at the same level of detail.

Frequently asked questions

Is Google Document AI cheaper than AWS Textract?

Not for invoices. Google's Invoice Parser bills $0.10 per document of up to ten pages, so a typical one or two page supplier invoice costs five to ten times more than Textract Analyze Expense at $0.01 per page. Google becomes competitive only on documents of ten pages or more, and cheaper than Textract on nothing. On generic OCR the two are identical at $1.50 per 1,000 pages.

How much does AWS Textract cost per page?

It depends entirely on the feature. Detect Document Text is $0.0015 per page, Analyze Expense for invoices and receipts is $0.01, Tables and Queries are $0.015 each, and Forms is $0.05. The most expensive combination, Forms with Custom Queries and Tables, is $0.08 per page. All rates drop at one million pages per month.

What is the difference between Textract Analyze Expense and AnalyzeDocument Forms?

Analyze Expense is a purpose built model for invoices and receipts that returns named fields such as vendor, invoice number, due date, tax and line items. Forms is a generic key value extractor that returns whatever label and value pairs it finds and leaves you to map them. Analyze Expense costs $10 per 1,000 pages, Forms costs $50, and on invoices Analyze Expense returns more structure for a fifth of the price.

Does Google Document AI have a free tier?

Yes, a small recurring one. The Enterprise Document OCR processor is free for the first 1,000 pages every month, then $1.50 per 1,000 up to five million and $0.60 above that. The specialized parsers, including the Invoice Parser, have no free allowance. AWS Textract offers only the standard twelve month new account trial and nothing recurring.

Can you get a volume discount on Google Document AI?

Yes, through the Gemini Enterprise Flexible Savings Plan, which applies a 10 percent discount on a one year commitment and 20 percent on three years across the Document AI catalogue. The Invoice Parser falls from $0.10 to $0.09 or $0.08 per document. You must opt in to the consumption model to receive it. AWS Textract has no commitment discount at all, only the automatic volume break above one million pages a month.

Do Textract and Document AI extract invoice line items?

Both return line item structures, and both are noticeably weaker on line items than on header fields. Independent testing of scanned invoices put Textract at 78 percent on header fields and 82 percent on line items, and Google Document AI at 82 percent on headers and 40 percent on line items. If your invoices are line item heavy, test on your own documents before committing, because that gap is where reprocessing cost hides.

Why does the AWS Textract pricing page not show prices?

The public pricing page has been returning unresolved template placeholders rather than dollar figures for some time. The reliable source is the AWS Price List API, which publishes the full Textract offer file as JSON per region. Every Textract figure in this article was read from that file for us-east-1 in September 2026.