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Fire-PDF

Performance & Cost

For document parsing, performance and cost are tightly coupled: your default mode, how many pages you process, and whether you route by document type.

Key facts

Section titled “Key facts”
  • PDFs are priced per page (1 credit per page)
  • fast/auto/ocr changes latency and success rate
  • maxPages is the simplest cost/time cap
Section titled “Recommended: learn your distribution first”
  1. sample ~20 PDFs
  2. estimate how many are text-native vs scanned vs table-heavy
  3. pick defaults per class instead of one-size-fits-all
Section titled “Recommended: two-stage parsing”
  • stage 1: auto + maxPages: 5 for quick probing
  • stage 2: for scanned/complex docs, switch to ocr or increase maxPages

Common pitfalls

Section titled “Common pitfalls”
  • defaulting everything to ocr without sampling
  • not keeping failure examples for regression testing

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