PDF & documents

Text Extractor: what you'd pay elsewhere

AltFTool's Text Extractor reads the text in a JPG or PNG image with the Tesseract OCR engine, free and in your browser, and lets you copy it out. ABBYY FineReader PDF Standard for Windows is $99/year or $16/month, with a 7-day trial. Convertio's Lite plan is US$11.99/month billed monthly, and its Terms of Use cap free OCR at 10 recognised pages.

Prices checked between and — each card below shows its own date.

Open the free Text ExtractorCompare prices

At a glance

Free Text Extractor here
Free · no account
ABBYY FineReader PDF
$99/year
USD list price
ABBYY FineReader PDF free tier
No free tier; a 7-day trial with no payment required.
Biggest trade-off
English only. There is no language selector, so other scripts and languages will come out wrong or empty.
Open the free tool

Pulling text out of an image with OCR: what the paid tools charge

Each figure is read from the vendor's own page on the date shown. Software pricing drifts — if a number here disagrees with the vendor's page, trust theirs.

ABBYY FineReader PDF

USD list price

Desktop OCR that turns scans and images into searchable PDFs and editable Word and Excel files, plus PDF editing and comparison.

Entry price

$99/year

FineReader PDF Standard for Windows, 1 standalone licence; $16/month or $267 for 3 years. Corporate is $165/year ($24/month)

$99/year (Standard, Windows)

Free tier

No free tier; a 7-day trial with no payment required.

FineReader PDF for Mac is $69/year or $186 for 3 years, with no monthly option. No perpetual licence is listed. The pricing page shows prices in USD.

Checked 3 days ago

Read from pdf.abbyy.com/pricing (opens in a new tab), pdf.abbyy.com/finereader-pdf (opens in a new tab)

Convertio

USD list price

Converting files between formats online, including video and OCR of scanned pages.

Entry price

US$11.99/month

Lite, billed monthly (US$6.99/month billed yearly); Basic US$22.99/month, Pro US$44.99/month

Free tier

Help centre: 1 GB per file, 10 conversion credits per 24 hours. Terms of Use: free OCR up to 10 pages.

Convertio's help centre and its Terms of Use describe different free-tier limits.

Checked 102 days ago

Read from convertio.co/pricing (opens in a new tab), convertio.co/terms (opens in a new tab), convertio.co/privacy (opens in a new tab), support.convertio.co/hc/en-us/articles/360004386774-Free-tier-limit-for-file-conversions (opens in a new tab), convertio.co (opens in a new tab)

What each free tier actually allows

Whether you need to pay at all depends on where the free plan's ceiling sits. Here it is in each vendor's own terms.

ABBYY FineReader PDF

USD list price
  • No free plan. The pricing page offers a '7-day trial' with 'No payment required' and states no page limit for the trial.

Convertio

USD list price
  • Convertio's help centre states the free tier allows up to 1 GB per file, 10 conversion credits per 24 hours, and 10 concurrently launched conversions (support.convertio.co, checked 2026-07-25)
  • Convertio's own Terms of Use still describes a stricter free tier - 'maximum of 100 MB single file size, a maximum of 2 concurrent conversions, a maximum of 10 conversion minutes within a 24-hour period' - so the two vendor pages disagree
  • Free OCR (text recognition) is limited to a maximum of 10 recognised pages per the Terms of Use
  • Free API use is capped at 25 file conversions within a 24-hour period per the Terms of Use
  • Ad-free pages are listed as a paid-plan feature, so free users see ads
  • Uploaded input files are deleted instantly after conversion; output files are deleted after 24 hours (or immediately if you click 'X')

What the free Text Extractor does not do

A comparison that cannot say what its own tool gives up is an advert.

  • English only. There is no language selector, so other scripts and languages will come out wrong or empty.
  • Images only: no PDFs, no multi-page documents, and one image at a time. It cannot make a searchable PDF.
  • Plain text out, with no layout, tables or formatting kept. Converting a scan into an editable Word or Excel file with its structure intact is what FineReader is for.
  • Accuracy drops on handwriting, low-resolution photos, skewed pages and unusual fonts, where a commercial engine is clearly better.

What the free Text Extractor does

  • Recognises text in a JPG or PNG image and shows it with Tesseract's confidence score
  • One-click copy of the extracted text
  • Recognition runs in the tab with Tesseract.js; the image is not uploaded, though the OCR engine and its language data are downloaded from a public CDN on first use
Open Text Extractor — the real tool, not a demo

Switching from a specific product? Free Convertio alternative

Questions people actually ask

Can it read a scanned PDF?

No. It takes JPG and PNG images only. To OCR a PDF you would first export its pages as images, or use a tool built for PDFs such as ABBYY FineReader, or Convertio within its 10-page free OCR limit.

Cite this page

APA, MLA, BibTeX

Quote anything on this page with a credit. The date below is the date this page's data was read, not the date you are reading it — cite it alongside any figure you take from here, because these numbers move.

Canonical URL
https://www.altftool.com/deals/text-extractor
Author and publisher
AltFTool — no individual author is credited on this page.
Prices checked
Prices read from

APA

AltFTool. (2026, November 1). Text Extractor: what you'd pay elsewhere. https://www.altftool.com/deals/text-extractor

MLA

"Text Extractor: what you'd pay elsewhere." AltFTool, 1 Nov. 2026, www.altftool.com/deals/text-extractor.

BibTeX

@misc{altftool-deals-text-extractor,
  author       = {{AltFTool}},
  title        = {{Text Extractor: what you'd pay elsewhere}},
  year         = {2026},
  month        = {nov},
  howpublished = {\url{https://www.altftool.com/deals/text-extractor}},
  note         = {Prices checked 2026-11-01. Sources: ABBYY FineReader PDF: \url{https://pdf.abbyy.com/pricing/}; Convertio (read 2026-07-25): \url{https://convertio.co/pricing/}.}
}

Each price is transcribed from the vendor's own page on the date shown and is never converted between currencies, so quote that date alongside any figure you take from here. The vendor links are plain links — no affiliate tracking, no referral IDs, no paid placement.

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