Adobe Acrobat Pro charges $19.99/month for bundled OCR. ABBYY FineReader wants $99/year. Online OCR sites make you upload your contracts, IDs and scans to a server you don't control. Textract does the same job locally, offline, with zero telemetry, for a one-time $19.
This is the full pricing breakdown: what Adobe Acrobat Pro actually costs over one, two and three years, what Textract gives you for $19 paid once, and the honest cases where the subscription is still the right call.
What Adobe Acrobat Pro actually costs you
At $19.99/mo, one Adobe Acrobat Pro subscription adds up to $240 every year — $720 over a three-year window, for software you stop owning the day you cancel. Textract is $19 the day you buy it, and the meter never runs again.
| Textract | Adobe Acrobat Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Sticker price | $19 once | $19.99/mo |
| Cost after 1 year | $19 | $240 |
| Cost after 2 years | $19 | $480 |
| Cost after 3 years | $19 | $720 |
Three years in, the gap is $701 — and every year after that adds another $240 to the subscription side of the ledger.
Textract vs Adobe Acrobat Pro, feature by feature
Price is only half the story — here's how the two line up on the things that decide day-to-day use:
| Textract | Adobe Acrobat Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $19 once | $19.99/month ($240/yr, forever) |
| Your documents | Never leave your machine | Uploaded for cloud OCR features |
| Works fully offline | Yes | Partial |
| Searchable PDF export | Yes | Yes |
| Batch folder OCR | Yes | Limited |
| Screenshot-to-text hotkey | Yes | No |
| Telemetry | None | Extensive |
| Source code | MIT, on GitHub | Closed |
What you get for $19, once
Local OCR for images & PDFs — searchable-PDF export, batch folders, screenshot hotkey. The highlights:
- 🖱️ Drag-drop OCR — Drop images (PNG/JPG/WEBP/BMP/TIFF) or PDFs, get per-page extracted text — PDFs are rasterized page-by-page automatically.
- 📃 Per-page results — Page thumbnails, text pane, per-page copy and copy-all, confidence indicator, .txt export.
- 🔍 Searchable-PDF export — Rebuilds the PDF with an invisible text layer positioned from OCR word bounding boxes — Ctrl-F-able and copy-able in any PDF reader.
- 📁 Batch folder mode — Point it at a folder (recursive optional), OCR everything, get a .txt per file and a summary of files/pages/words/failures.
One month of Acrobat Pro costs more than Textract, forever. Everything after month one is money you keep.
Switching is 3 steps
- Buy once on Whop. One-time $19 for the packaged Windows installer — English OCR bundled, tray icon and hotkey ready out of the box.
- Drop in scans or hit the hotkey. Drag images or PDFs into the app, or press Ctrl+Shift+T from anywhere to snap a screen region straight to clipboard text.
- Export what you need. Copy text per page, save .txt files, batch a whole folder, or export a true searchable PDF you can Ctrl-F in any reader.
When paying Adobe Acrobat Pro is still the right call
Being straight about it: the subscription earns its keep in three situations. If your team is large enough that Adobe Acrobat Pro's collaboration features, permissions and admin controls are genuinely load-bearing; if your workflow is built on its integrations and leaving means rebuilding that plumbing; or if you have enterprise requirements — SSO, audit logs, SLAs, a vendor to call — that a pay-once app doesn't come with. Everyone else is paying $19.99/mo for a job that runs fine on hardware they already own.
If that's you, Textract is $19, once. For the deeper dive, read the Textract vs Adobe Acrobat Pro head-to-head.
Frequently asked questions
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — the full source is MIT at github.com/bensblueprints/textract-ocr-mvp, always. $19 buys the signed installer, 1-click setup and updates instead of npm i && npm start.
How accurate is the OCR?
It's Tesseract's accuracy — excellent on clean scans, screenshots and printed documents, mediocre on handwriting or heavily skewed photos. It's not a cloud vision model, and we're not claiming it is. For sensitive paperwork the trade-off is worth it: nothing gets uploaded.
Is the searchable PDF real or a gimmick?
Real. Each page is rebuilt as the original image plus an invisible text layer positioned from OCR word bounding boxes — and the test suite round-trips the output through a PDF parser to prove the text layer extracts correctly, not just eyeballs it in a reader.
Does it replace Acrobat Pro?
For OCR, yes. But Acrobat is a full PDF editor — forms, signatures, redaction, page editing. Textract does one job (getting text out of images and scans, offline) and does it for the price of one month of Acrobat.
Does it ever connect to the internet?
Only if you download an additional OCR language, which is clearly surfaced with a progress UI. The OCR engine runs from bundled local files — never a CDN — and there's no telemetry, no uploads, no account.
More on Adobe Acrobat Pro pricing
Textract — product page, demo & full feature list · All OneTimeSuite pricing breakdowns
Try Textract — $19, once
Local OCR for images & PDFs — searchable-PDF export, batch folders, screenshot hotkey.