Mindee alternative for teams that need arbitrary fields, not fixed models
Mindee is a solid, well-reviewed OCR API with real engineering behind it. Its model is document-type-first: you choose the invoice model, or the receipt model, and you get that model's field set. That works well when your documents fall into those categories and badly when they do not.
Fieldcast is field-first. There is no model to select. You name the fields you want — up to 40 of them, in whatever vocabulary your own database already uses — and those are the keys that come back. A document type nobody has built a model for is not a blocker.
Side by side
| Fieldcast | Mindee | |
|---|---|---|
| Approach | Field names sent with each request | Pre-trained models per document type (invoice, receipt, passport, ID, bank statement), plus custom models for other types. |
| Setup before first extraction | None | You pick the model that matches your document type, or commission a custom one. |
| Pricing | Free 50/mo · $19/mo for 1,000 · $49/mo for 5,000 | Starter listed at 44 €/month billed annually (529 €/year), Pro at 116 €/month billed annually, at roughly 0.044 € per credit. A credit is one physical page. 14-day free trial, no permanent free tier. Figures read from their pricing page on 26 August 2026. |
| Free tier | 50 extractions/month, no card, no expiry | 14-day trial only. No standing free tier. |
| Billing unit | One extraction per API call, regardless of page count | One credit per physical page. A five-page contract costs five credits. |
| OCR for scanned images | Not supported yet | Yes — OCR is the core of the product. |
| Missing field behaviour | Returns null — never a fabricated value | Returns the model's field set with confidence scores, so you judge low-confidence values yourself. |
Mindee figures were read from mindee.com and public sources in August 2026 and may have changed since. Check their pricing page before deciding — and if anything here is out of date, email me and I will correct it.
Choose Mindee instead if…
- You need OCR for scanned or photographed documents. Fieldcast does not do OCR yet.
- You need bounding-box polygons or per-field confidence scores. Fieldcast returns values, not coordinates or confidence.
- You need data processing localisation, custom SLAs, or a dedicated account manager.
- You want a vendor with an established support organisation and public review history rather than a one-person beta.
These are real gaps, not false modesty. A comparison page that pretends the other product has no advantages is not worth reading.
Choose Fieldcast if…
- Your documents arrive in layouts you do not control and cannot enumerate in advance.
- You want the extracted keys to match your own schema, not a vendor's field taxonomy.
- A fabricated value would be worse than a missing one — Fieldcast returns
nullrather than guessing. - You want to test against your own documents before paying anything.
What was actually measured
On a ten-field invoice, live in production: all ten fields correct in 1.8 seconds, dates normalised to ISO-8601, monetary values returned as numbers. On a receipt in a different currency and date format, every field correct and four fields that did not exist in the document returned as null. Accuracy on your documents should be measured on your documents — that is what the free tier is for.
Questions
How does per-page billing compare?
Mindee counts one credit per physical page, so a five-page contract costs five credits. Fieldcast counts one extraction per API call regardless of page count. Which is cheaper depends entirely on your document lengths — run both against your own files before deciding.
Is there a free tier?
Mindee offers a 14-day trial. Fieldcast has a standing free tier of 50 extractions per month with no card, which exists so you can measure accuracy on your own documents rather than trusting anyone's benchmark.
Try it against your own file
Free tier is 50 extractions a month, no card, no sales call.
Read the quickstart