Quick answer
Yes — for the part of PDF Expert covered on this page, Textract is a one-time-purchase alternative. It costs $19 once, while PDF Expert lists from $79.99/yr. Local OCR for images & PDFs — searchable-PDF export, batch folders, screenshot hotkey. It is not a 1:1 replacement for everything PDF Expert does — the honest limits are spelled out below.
The verdict
Switch to Textract if the slice of PDF Expert you actually pay for is the slice Textract covers — and a $19 one-time price beats from $79.99/yr for as long as you use it.
Stay with PDF Expert if this sounds like you — PDF Expert wraps OCR inside a complete reading, annotation and editing app. Textract only extracts text — if you need to mark up the document afterwards, you need the editor around it.
Head to head
| Textract | PDF Expert | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $19 once | from $79.99/yr |
| Where it runs | Your own machine | Vendor cloud (hosted service) |
| Renewal | None — the license never expires | Recurring — access ends when you stop paying |
| 5-year cost | $19 | ~$399.95 |
About PDF Expert: PDF Expert is Readdle's polished PDF editor for Mac, iPhone and iPad. It lists at about $79.99/yr, with a one-time Mac license around $139.99 also offered.
Where PDF Expert still wins
PDF Expert wraps OCR inside a complete reading, annotation and editing app. Textract only extracts text — if you need to mark up the document afterwards, you need the editor around it.
Where Textract wins
The feature many people subscribe to PDF Expert for is OCR — making scans searchable and selectable. Textract is a dedicated local OCR tool: drag-drop images and PDFs, per-page results, searchable-PDF export, batch folders and a screenshot-to-text hotkey, all offline for $19 once.
- Price, permanently. $19 once versus from $79.99/yr for as long as you use it. There is no renewal, no seat count and no tier gate.
- 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.
The math
PDF Expert lists from $79.99/yr. Textract is $19, paid once:
- After 1 year: Textract has cost you $19 total — PDF Expert has cost ~$79.99.
- After 3 years: Textract is still $19 — the subscription is at ~$239.97.
- After 5 years: Textract is still $19 — the subscription is at ~$399.95.
Common 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.
Try Textract — $19, one time
Or get Textract plus every other app in the suite: the OneTimeSuite bundle is currently $97, one time.