Unlimited-OCR
Unlimited OCR Works: Welcome the Era of One-shot Long-horizon Parsing.
The Lens
By Erik Loyd, SaaS CEO and former COO/CFO of an AWS Premier Partner.
Updated Oct 2026
Unlimited-OCR is Baidu's open model for reading documents. Point it at a scan, a screenshot or a long PDF and it returns the text with layout tags in one pass instead of stitching pages together. It builds on DeepSeek-OCR, and code and weights are both MIT, so commercial use is free.
Running it yourself means an NVIDIA GPU. It's a 3.3-billion-parameter model (about 6.7GB of weights), served through Hugging Face transformers, vLLM's prebuilt Docker image, or a custom SGLang wheel the repo ships. There's no app or UI: you write the script that feeds it pages.
Baidu Cloud now hosts it as an API, free for a limited time (200 test pages for verified individuals, 1,000 for companies), but signup means real-name verification on a Chinese cloud. Solo: free on a rented GPU, or the Hugging Face demo. Small teams: one GPU box behind vLLM. Larger teams: add a queue, or stay on AWS Textract if you need forms and tables pre-extracted.
The catch: loading it runs Baidu's own model code (trust_remote_code=True), and the hosted API sends your files to Baidu. Self-host sensitive documents, pin a model revision, and test on your own messy scans, since the benchmarks are Baidu's.
Free vs Self-Hosted vs Paid
fully freeFree: The code on GitHub and the model weights on Hugging Face are both MIT licensed (each repo carries its own MIT LICENSE file, copyright Baidu 2026). Free to download, modify and use commercially. A free demo runs on Hugging Face Spaces, and the model is also mirrored on ModelScope.
Self-hosted: The real way to run it. You supply an NVIDIA GPU; the README's transformers path is tested on Python 3.12.3 and CUDA 12.9. The model is about 3.3B parameters, roughly 6.7GB of BF16 weights. Three serving options: plain transformers (model.infer for a single image, model.infer_multi for multi-page and PDF), vLLM with official images (vllm/vllm-openai:unlimited-ocr on CUDA 13.0, unlimited-ocr-cu129 for Hopper GPUs), or SGLang via a pre-release SGLang wheel bundled in the repo, which exposes an OpenAI-compatible streaming API. infer.py batch-processes an image folder or a PDF with concurrent requests. No license fee; you pay for the GPU.
Paid: Baidu Cloud sells a hosted Document Parsing (Unlimited-OCR) API that returns JSON or Markdown. It is currently free for a limited time: 200 free test pages for real-name-verified individuals, 1,000 for verified companies. It is asynchronous (submit, then poll), PDFs up to 500 pages, and Baidu has not published a per-page price yet. Your files go to Baidu's servers.
Free and MIT for both code and weights; your only cost is the GPU. Baidu Cloud's hosted API is free for now (200 test pages for individuals, 1,000 for companies) but has no published price and needs real-name verification.
What to do by team size
- Solo
- free; try the Hugging Face demo, then a rented GPU for real jobs
- Small team
- free on one GPU box served with vLLM
- Medium team
- free self-hosted behind a job queue; budget GPU time, not licenses
- Large team
- free self-hosted at scale, or stay on a managed OCR service if you need extracted forms and an SLA
Get tools like this every Wednesday
One featured tool, three on the radar. No fluff.
Similar Tools
Tesseract Open Source OCR Engine (main repository)
Get your documents ready for gen AI
Convert Word, PowerPoint, Excel, OpenDocument, RTF, EPUB, CSV, and PDF to clean Markdown. Built in Rust, with Node.js and Python bindings.
A polyglot document intelligence framework with a Rust core. Extract text, metadata, images, and structured information from PDFs, Office documents, images, and 91+ formats. Available for Rust, Python, Ruby, Java, Go, PHP, Elixir, C#, R, C, TypeScript (Node/Bun/Wasm/Deno)- or use via CLI, REST API, or MCP server.
Turn any PDF or image document into structured data for your AI. A powerful, lightweight OCR toolkit that bridges the gap between images/PDFs and LLMs. Supports 100+ languages.
Open-source, self-hosted file-processing tool. Convert, compress, OCR, transcribe & run local AI across image, video, audio, PDF & documents, via UI, REST API & pipelines. Your files never leave your network.
A low score is not a verdict on quality. Young and niche tools start low by design. How we calculate scores
Trust Signals
License: MIT License
Code and model weights are both MIT.
Commercial use: ✓ Yes
About
- Owner
- Baidu (Organization)
- Stars
- 30,984
- Forks
- 3,315
Also by Baidu
Explore Further
More tools in the directory
rea
Reverse engineer anything with agents, from app behavior down to native binaries.
441.9k ★openclaw
Your own personal AI assistant. Any OS. Any Platform. The lobster way. 🦞
394.2k ★everything-claude-code
The agent harness performance optimization system. Skills, instincts, memory, security, and research-first development for Claude Code, Codex, Opencode, Cursor and beyond.
299.8k ★Featured in The Open Source Drop #16