Choosing a receipt OCR API in 2026 means wading through marketing claims, opaque pricing pages, and demo videos that never show the hard cases — faded thermal receipts, crumpled handwritten notes, multilingual grocery bills.
We ran the same test dataset through four leading APIs and documented what actually happened.
The contenders
| API | Model | Founded | Free tier |
|---|---|---|---|
| ReceiptConverter | GPT-4o Vision | 2024 | 10/mo |
| Veryfi | Proprietary OCR | 2017 | 100/mo (trial) |
| Mindee | Proprietary + OWN | 2018 | 250/mo |
| Taggun | Google Vision | 2016 | 100/mo |
Accuracy on real receipts
We tested 200 receipts across five categories: restaurant, grocery, gas station, hotel, and e-commerce. Each receipt was graded on vendor extraction, total extraction, line item accuracy, and date parsing.
Restaurant receipts
The hardest category — handwritten specials, messy totals, variable tip lines. ReceiptConverter and Mindee both scored above 94% on total extraction. Taggun dropped to ~82% on non-standard layouts.
Grocery receipts
Long receipts with dense line items. All four APIs performed well on total extraction. Line item accuracy varied significantly: ReceiptConverter leveraged GPT-4o's contextual understanding to handle items like "ORGNC CRNBRY JCE 32OZ" correctly — older OCR models often truncated or mislabeled these.
Faded thermal receipts
This is where model architecture matters. Traditional OCR (Tesseract, Google Vision-based) fails on low-contrast text. GPT-4o Vision's image understanding significantly outperforms traditional pipelines on degraded receipts.
Pricing comparison
| API | Free | Pay-as-you-go | $9/mo | $19/mo |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| ReceiptConverter | 10/mo | — | 100/mo | 500/mo |
| Veryfi | Trial only | $0.08/doc | ~$50/mo | ~$150/mo |
| Mindee | 250/mo | $0.10/page | — | — |
| Taggun | 100/mo | $0.05/doc | $49/mo | — |
ReceiptConverter is the most affordable option for low-to-medium volume. For high-volume enterprise use cases (10,000+ receipts/month), contact each vendor for custom pricing.
Response schema
A good API returns more than just the total. Here's what each API returns by default:
| Field | ReceiptConverter | Veryfi | Mindee | Taggun |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Vendor name | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Total | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Subtotal | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
| Line items | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ |
| Tax breakdown | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | Partial |
| Tip | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Payment method | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Category | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | ❌ |
| Currency | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ |
Developer experience
ReceiptConverter ships an OpenAPI 3.0 spec, an llms.txt for AI agents, an AGENTS.md file, and full documentation at receiptconverter.com/docs. The API accepts both multipart/form-data file uploads and JSON { url: "..." } requests. No SDK required.
Veryfi has the most mature SDK ecosystem (Python, Node, iOS, Android) but at significantly higher price points.
Mindee's strength is document AI beyond receipts — passports, invoices, tax forms. If you need a multi-document pipeline, it's worth considering.
Taggun is the simplest API in the group but returns less structured data.
The verdict
For startups and individual developers: ReceiptConverter offers the best accuracy-to-price ratio with a generous free tier and simple HTTP API.
For enterprise / high volume: Veryfi and Mindee offer better SLAs and compliance features.
For multi-document pipelines: Mindee if you need passports, IDs, and invoices alongside receipts.
Ready to try ReceiptConverter? Get started for free → or read the API quickstart.
Related reading:
- How the AI receipt scanner works under the hood — vision model vs. traditional OCR, explained
- Receipt to JSON: full API tutorial with Python, JS, and cURL
- Connect ReceiptConverter to QuickBooks automatically