Amazon Textract
Managed OCR that also extracts forms, tables, and handwriting as structured data.
Verified against AWS documentation · 2026-08-24
Key facts
- 01Goes past plain OCR — returns key-value pairs, table cells, checkboxes, and per-block confidence scores
- 02Sync (DetectDocumentText, AnalyzeDocument) for single pages; async (Start*/Get*) for multipage PDFs, S3-only, SNS on completion
- 03Pre-trained specialists: AnalyzeExpense for invoices/receipts, AnalyzeID for US licenses and passports — no templates to maintain
- 04Limits: 10 MB and 1 page sync; 500 MB and 3,000 pages async; async results expire after 7 days
Exam triggers
Phrases and scenarios that point here.
- "Extract text/data from scanned documents", "forms", "tables", "handwriting" → Textract
- Text in photos, signs, or product labels → Rekognition, not Textract
- Multipage PDF → async API + S3 + SNS; single image → sync API
- Low-confidence extractions need human sign-off → Textract + Amazon A2I
Not this service
- Text in photos and scenes rather than documents → Amazon Rekognition
- Meaning from the text — entities, sentiment, PHI → Amazon Comprehend
- Speech to text → Amazon Transcribe
Use cases
- 01Accounts payable: supplier invoices hit S3, AnalyzeExpense returns vendor, totals, and line items, and the approval workflow starts without anyone re-keying a number
- 02Insurance or benefits intake: scanned claim forms where the checkbox state matters as much as the text — selection elements tell you which boxes were actually ticked
- 03KYC and onboarding: AnalyzeID reads a licence photo to prefill the signup form, with the applicant confirming rather than typing
- 04Archive digitisation: decades of scanned PDFs run through an async job, output indexed into OpenSearch so a paper archive becomes searchable
- 05Lab reports and financial statements: table extraction keeps row/column relationships intact, so results load straight into a database schema
How it's charged
- 01Billed per page processed per feature — not per API call, and not per document
- 02DetectDocumentText (raw OCR) is the cheap floor; AnalyzeDocument with Forms is over 30x that per page
- 03Features stack — Forms + Tables on one page bills both; Layout rides along free when used with Tables
- 04Handwriting carries no surcharge, but a 300-page PDF bills 300 pages even if you only needed three of them
- 05Async output sits in Textract's bucket free for 7 days; copying it out, plus S3, SNS, and SQS, is billed separately
