PDF Text Extractor API: Bulk PDF URLs to Text

Give it links to text-based PDF files and get back the full text, page count, title, creation date and word count, with an optional list of the text of each page. Fast and cheap for contracts, papers, manuals and reports that are not scanned.

What you get

Field	Meaning
url	The PDF link you gave
pages_total	Pages in the PDF
pages_read	Pages actually read (limited by maxPages)
title	Title from the PDF metadata, or null
creation_date	Creation date from the metadata, or null
word_count	Words in the extracted text
text	The extracted text
pages	List of {page, text} (only with perPage)

Real example (13 Oct 2026, default input):

{"url": "https://www.w3.org/WAI/ER/tests/xhtml/testfiles/resources/pdf/dummy.pdf", "pages_total": 1, "pages_read": 1, "title": null, "creation_date": "2007-02-23 17:56:37+02:00", "word_count": 3, "text": "Dummy PDF file"}

PDFs that cannot be read are skipped and not charged, so every row you pay for contains text.

How to use it in 3 steps

1. Paste the PDF links (public http(s), up to 100 per run, 20 MB each).
2. Optionally switch on perPage to also get the text of each page, and set maxPages (1 to 300).
3. Run it and read the text from the dataset.

Pricing

$3 per 1,000 PDFs ($0.003 per PDF, whatever its number of pages up to maxPages). Example: 500 PDFs = $1.50. You pay only for PDFs with extracted text; scanned, encrypted, broken or unreachable PDFs are free.

Integrations

• Apify API and clients: start the Actor from any language with the Apify API (or the JavaScript and Python clients) and read the dataset when the run ends.
• Make, n8n and Zapier: use the official Apify modules, pick kadro/pdf-text-extractor-api, pass the input as JSON and map the dataset rows to your next step.
• Google Sheets: send the dataset to a sheet with the Apify integration or export it as CSV or Excel from the Console.
• MCP (Claude, Cursor and other AI agents): add the Apify MCP server https://mcp.apify.com/?actors=kadro/pdf-text-extractor-api and ask, for example: "Extract the text of these 30 PDF reports, page by page, and tell me which mention "renewal"."

FAQ

Does it read scanned PDFs? No, there is no OCR here. Scanned PDFs are skipped for free. Use our Bulk OCR Actor for them.

Do I get tables or Markdown? No. Layout and tables come out as plain text. Markdown, table extraction and chunks are not available yet.

What is not charged? Encrypted PDFs, files that are not PDFs, PDFs without text, files too big and blocked addresses.

Is it legal and private? It only downloads public links you provide. Make sure you may process the documents; the text is stored only in your run.

Limitations

• Text PDFs only: no OCR, so scanned or password-protected PDFs are skipped.
• No Markdown, no table structure and no RAG chunks: output is plain text.
• Max 100 PDFs per run, 20 MB each, up to 300 pages read per PDF.
• Only public http(s) addresses; private and local addresses are blocked.

Other Kadro tools

• Bulk OCR
• Article Text Extractor
• Website to PDF
• Website to Markdown + llms.txt

Credits and license

Built on pypdf (BSD license).

Found it useful? Please leave a review ⭐ — it helps a lot. Bugs or feature ideas: open an issue, I answer within 24 h.