Short version: most invoice APIs stop at extraction, they hand you fields and leave the joining, checking and formatting to you. We hand back a document that is already structured, already checked against the country's format rules, and already ready for your accounting system. That is a different product, and it is priced differently.
Ask a typical invoice API for an invoice and you get something like this:
{
"vendor": "Fitzpatrick and Sons",
"invoice_no": "12847181",
"date": "2026-03-03",
"total": "6860.45",
"line_items": [...]
}
Clean JSON. Now look at what you still have to do before this is usable:
That is the real work. Extraction is perhaps a third of the effort of actually booking an invoice.
The finished document.
One flow: upload, we analyse, you export. No intermediate collection step. No "now go build the mapping."
Most invoice APIs, at the core, do one thing: look at a picture and try to read it. That is why their accuracy plateaus around 90–95%, pictures of invoices are hard.
But a large share of business invoices in Europe are not pictures. They are structured files that already contain every number as data:
| Format | Country | What it is |
|---|---|---|
| ZUGFeRD / Factur-X | DE, FR | PDF with embedded XML, data is inside |
| XRechnung | DE | pure XML for public sector |
| UBL / Peppol | EU-wide | the BIS standard format |
| FatturaPA | IT | mandatory Italian e-invoice |
| Russian UPD | RU | ФНС format 5.03 |
When an invoice arrives in one of these, there is nothing to recognise. The numbers are in the file. Reading structured data gives you 100% on key fields, not 95%.
And that is free with us. Electronic invoices do not consume your quota,, only scans and photos do, because only those actually require recognition. If most of your suppliers invoice electronically, your real costs drop sharply.
€0.07 per scanned page through the API (the same figure in US dollars for the American market). That is:
| Pages | You pay |
|---|---|
| 1 000 | €70 |
| 3 000 | €210 |
| 30 000 | €2 100 |
| 100 000 | €7 000 |
An average invoice is about three pages, so an average scanned invoice costs roughly 21 euro cents, and it arrives ready for your accounting system rather than as a bag of fields.
Electronic invoices: no charge.
API access: minimum top-up €8. (For the US market the same numbers apply in dollars: minimum top-up $8.) They cost us nothing to read, so we do not charge for them.
Honestly: if you only need raw text and fields for your own processing, a cheaper extraction API will serve you and cost a fraction. Use it. We are not competing on being the cheapest way to get text.
This is worth paying for when:
An extraction API gives you fields. We give you the document that goes into your books.
Try it: duebuddy.work/api, five pages free, no card required.