Unlimited-OCR

Unlimited-OCR is Baidu's open model for turning images and PDFs into text. Point it at a scanned contract, a multi-page report, or a screenshot full of text and it reads the whole thing in one pass, even very long documents. It handles single images, batches, and full PDFs, with streaming output so you see results as they parse. The weights are on Hugging Face and ModelScope under the MIT license, which means free to use, including commercially, with no strings.

Running it yourself is where the cost shows up. This needs an NVIDIA GPU, CUDA 12.9, Python 3.12, and a recent PyTorch and transformers stack. You can run it through plain transformers or through SGLang for faster batch serving. It builds on DeepSeek-OCR, so the lineage is solid, but you are still standing up GPU infrastructure and a model server. There is no hosted API here, no dashboard, no support line. You bring the hardware.

For solo work, the Hugging Face demo is free to try and you can run it on a rented GPU when you have a real job. Small teams that already process documents will want a dedicated GPU box or a cloud GPU. Larger teams treating OCR as a pipeline should put SGLang behind a queue. If you need OCR as a managed service with an SLA, look at a cloud vendor instead.

The catch: MIT covers the code and weights, but accuracy on messy real-world scans is the thing you have to test on your own documents before trusting it. No benchmark replaces running it on your actual files.