Continia Document Capture Pricing: Business Central Transaction Tiers, Feature Module Costs and OCR Alternatives

Last updated September 2026

How much does Continia Document Capture cost?

Continia Document Capture is priced in monthly bands based on how many documents you register, not per user and not per page. In USD, the Essential base license runs from $14 a month for up to 25 documents to $11,660 a month for up to 275,000. Each feature module is charged on top, from $14 to $835 a month, with a 25 percent discount on the second module activated and 50 percent on the third and beyond.

Every figure on this page comes from the USD price sheet Continia publishes for Microsoft AppSource on Business Central Online, marked Valid April 2026, plus the January 2023 edition of the same sheet for comparison. Continia describes these as recommended prices excluding tax, subject to change, and all billing runs through your Business Central partner, so treat them as the reference point rather than a contract.

Continia Document Capture price list in USD

The band is set by the number of transactions registered in a calendar month. Essential is the base license. The feature module column is the price for one module at full price, before the stacking discount.

Notice that the cost per document does not fall smoothly. It bottoms out around $0.042 to $0.046 in the very large bands, but between 30,000 and 90,000 documents a month it actually rises again, because the band steps widen faster than the price does in places. Volume discounting here is real but it is not monotonic, and the curve is worth checking against your own projected growth rather than assuming bigger is always cheaper per unit.

Where the Continia pricing cliffs are

Because you pay a flat fee per band, one additional registered document at the wrong moment can move you up a band. These are the steepest jumps in the April 2026 USD sheet, measured on the Essential license alone.

The practical consequence is that a business sitting at 1,480 documents a month has a real financial reason to care about the last twenty documents of the month, and a business at 1,520 has a reason to look at what is being registered that does not need to be. Continia counting rules help here: a PDF that is OCR processed but never registered does not count, so documents that end up rejected or filed elsewhere are not billable. That is a genuinely customer friendly rule and it is worth knowing before you optimize the wrong thing.

What do the Continia feature modules add to the price?

Essential on its own gives you capture into Business Central. The four feature modules, Advanced Capture, Order Matching, Document Approval and Purchase Contracts, are what most AP teams are actually buying, and they are priced separately. The discount stacks: first module full price, second 25 percent off, third and fourth 50 percent off.

Continia publishes a worked example on the April 2026 sheet at 245 registered documents, which falls in the 201 to 300 band. It is reproduced exactly below.

That is the number worth carrying around. The rate card headline for this band is $90, and the realistic fully configured bill is $318.25, which works out at $1.30 per document at 245 documents a month. The shortcut for a full four module stack is to multiply the module rate by 2.75 and add Essential, because 1 plus 0.75 plus 0.5 plus 0.5 equals 2.75.

How Continia Document Capture pricing changed from 2023 to 2026

Continia repriced Document Capture between the January 2023 and April 2026 USD sheets, and the increase was not spread evenly. Customers registering more than 400 documents a month saw the Essential license rise by a consistent 11 percent. Customers in the five smallest bands saw increases of 20 to 56 percent.

Feature modules moved further. Above the small bands they rose by a consistent 17.4 percent against the base license 11 percent, so the add-ons inflated roughly 58 percent faster than the thing they attach to. A module that cost $170 a month at the 1,501 to 2,000 band in 2023 costs $199 today.

The structure changed too. The January 2023 sheet listed Advanced Capture, Order Matching, Document Approval and Purchase Contracts as four separate priced rows, which happened to carry identical figures. The April 2026 sheet collapses them into a single Feature Modules row. The 2026 sheet also switched its language from registered documents to transactions and added production environments to the aggregation rule, so multiple production environments now visibly pool into one monthly count.

Is Continia Document Capture expensive compared with metered OCR?

This is the comparison buyers ask for, and it needs a caveat before the numbers. Continia is not selling OCR. It is selling capture, approval workflow, purchase order matching and contract handling, all native inside Business Central. A raw extraction API sells you fields in JSON and nothing else. Comparing them on price alone flatters the API and tells you very little.

With that said, here is the honest arithmetic at 1,000 documents a month averaging two pages each, which is 2,000 pages.

So the Business Central integration and workflow is costing somewhere between $231 and $635 a month at that volume. For a team that would otherwise pay somebody to key invoices and chase approvals by email, that can be straightforwardly worth it. For a team that already has an approval process it likes and only wants the data off the page, it is a lot to pay for OCR.

One point genuinely favors Continia here: it bills per document, not per page. A forty page construction invoice costs the same $0.25 as a one page utility bill, where a per-page meter would charge forty times as much. If your vendor mix is heavy with long documents, Continia band model can be the cheaper structure, and that is not something the per-page vendors will tell you.

Does Continia Document Capture have a free trial?

Yes, and it has two expiry conditions. The trial ends 30 days after installation, or when 25 documents have been registered, whichever comes first. All modules are active during the trial so you can evaluate Order Matching and Document Approval without buying them. The 25 document ceiling is the one that catches people out, because a real AP inbox can consume it in a single morning and leave you evaluating a product you can no longer feed.

A practical approach is to hold the trial until you have a representative batch ready, then run your five ugliest recurring vendor layouts through it deliberately rather than pointing your live inbox at it on day one.

What counts toward Continia consumption?

The counting rules decide your band, so they decide your price. Continia documents them clearly, which is more than most vendors in this category manage.

The line worth underlining is that a document is one transaction regardless of page count, and that OCR without registration is free. Together those two rules mean the way to control a Continia bill is to control what gets registered, not what gets scanned.

Is Continia Document Capture priced per user?

No. Continia states there are no extra fees for additional Business Central users, additional companies, bank accounts, production environments, or usage of the Continia Delivery Network. Price depends only on the number of transactions registered in a calendar month. For an AP function with many occasional approvers, this is a meaningful advantage over per seat licensing, because adding reviewers costs nothing.

Continia Document Capture alternatives worth pricing against it

If the band structure or the module stacking does not suit your volume, the realistic comparisons fall into three groups, and each answers a different question.

A common pattern is to run Continia for the Business Central workflow and use a metered extractor for everything that falls outside it: the non-Business Central entity, the scanned archive backlog, the supplier that sends a hundred invoices in one PDF. Splitting the work by where it belongs usually beats forcing all of it through whichever tool was bought first, and it keeps you off the wrong side of a band boundary.

If you also handle employee spend alongside vendor invoices, that is a separate problem with separate economics, and running receipts through a dedicated expense management system keeps them out of your registered document count entirely. Once bills are posted, matching them back against what actually left the bank is a different job again, and a purpose built account reconciliation tool will do it faster than a spreadsheet of exceptions.