Open OCR costs fell 5x in 18 months: $0.51 to $0.095 per 1,000 pages, benchmarked on 850 pages

vanstriendaniel · x · 2026-11-13

The author benchmarked 8 open OCR models from the last 18 months on the same 850 pages on one Hugging Face Jobs GPU.

Key findings

Cost per 1,000 pages dropped from $0.51 to $0.095, roughly halving every 10 months—but most of the drop comes from one model: LightOnOCR-3-0.8B, about 5x cheaper.
How you run a model matters too: GLM-OCR on 250 dense pages went from $1.57/1k pages (February setup) to $0.40 today (many pages in flight, pages fitted to 2,048 px, newer vLLM, bigger GPU).
Full-size scans didn't help: 1.3–4.2x more expensive than 2,048 px with no accuracy gain on book pages.
On 282 checked book pages, every model gets its median page over 99% right; two cheaper models make 1.5x the errors of the oldest.
On dense two-column 1771 print, the oldest model beat most newer ones; the newest only ties it.

Testing all eight on 850 pages cost about $6 of GPU time—still worth testing on your own pages. A full post is coming.

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