PDF Text Extractor — PDF URL to clean text and metadata

Turn any PDF URL into clean, structured text plus document metadata — the document reader your AI agents, RAG pipelines, and document-QA flows need. Extract text from PDF online, by API, or as an agent tool via Apify MCP: no OCR bills for born-digital PDFs, no start fee, one flat price per document that actually parses.

What you get

• Full text extracted from the PDF, ready to embed, index, or summarize.
• Page count (pages) and character count (characters).
• Document metadata (info): title, author, subject, creator, producer, creation/modification dates.
• Bulk mode: up to 50 PDF URLs in one run, one result object per document.
• Fail-soft: one bad URL never fails the run — it returns {ok: false, error} and is never charged.

Input

{
  "url": "https://www.irs.gov/pub/irs-pdf/f1040.pdf",
  "urls": ["https://example.com/report.pdf", "https://example.com/whitepaper.pdf"],
  "maxPdfs": 25
}

Provide url, urls, or both. PDFs are capped at ~20MB each, 50 per run.

Output

One dataset item per PDF (real run, 2026-08-07):

{
  "url": "https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tests/xhtml/testfiles/resources/pdf/dummy.pdf",
  "ok": true,
  "pages": 1,
  "characters": 14,
  "info": { "title": null, "author": null, "producer": "Skia/PDF m79", "creationDate": null },
  "text": "Dummy PDF file"
}

A failed URL comes back uncharged:

{ "url": "https://bad.example/x.pdf", "ok": false, "error": "HTTP 404 fetching PDF" }

Pricing — $0.003 per PDF, no start fee, failures free

Flat $0.003 per PDF successfully processed. No per-run start charge, and PDFs that fail (dead URL, not a PDF, encrypted, oversized) are never billed.

Compared with other paid PDF text extractors on Apify (prices checked via API 2026-08-07):

Actor	Start fee	Per PDF
This actor	$0	$0.003 — failures free
automation-lab/pdf-text-extractor	$0.005	$0.00345
memo23/pdf-text-extractor	$0.005	$0.005 (+$0.015 per OCR page)
santamaria-automations/pdf-extractor	$0.001	$0.005

A single PDF costs $0.003 here vs $0.00845 on the biggest incumbent; a 25-PDF batch costs $0.075 vs $0.091. Cheaper at every batch size.

Limits (honest ones)

• Text extraction only — scanned/image-only PDFs return little or no text (no OCR; that keeps it cheap).
• 20MB per PDF, 50 PDFs per run.
• Password-protected PDFs fail (uncharged).
• The URL must serve the PDF bytes directly (redirects are followed; HTML viewer pages are not PDFs).

For agents and automation

• Capability: fetch one or many PDF URLs and return extracted text + metadata as JSON
• Required input: url or urls
• Returns: one JSON record per PDF; text holds the full extracted text
• Bounded: maxPdfs caps the run; failures isolate per document
• Side effects: none