The price anchor
| Textract | Adobe Acrobat Pro | |
|---|---|---|
| Monthly | $0 — no subscription | $19.99/mo |
| Annual | $0 after purchase | $240 |
| 5-year total | $19 | $1,200 |
| 10-year total | $19 | $2,400 |
Subscription figures from the vendor's published pricing ($19.99/mo, ~$240/yr); the Textract column is the full price, paid once.
Break-even analysis
One month of Acrobat Pro costs more than Textract, forever. Everything after month one is money you keep.
- After 1 year: Textract has cost you $19 total — Adobe Acrobat Pro has cost $240.
- After 3 years: Textract is still $19 — the subscription is at $720.
- After 5 years: Textract is still $19 — the subscription is at $1,200.
What you get for $19 once
- 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.
- Screenshot-to-text hotkey. Global Ctrl+Shift+T opens a region-capture overlay even while minimized to tray — DPI-aware across multi-monitor setups, auto-copies to clipboard.
- No renewal, ever. The license does not expire and there is no per-seat meter — $19 is the whole price.
Pricing 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.
Textract — $19, one time
Or get Textract plus every other app in the suite: the OneTimeSuite bundle is currently $97, one time.