Extend review
Extend is one of the better products we tested for single-page documents, one of the best at messy pages in particular, and it has the most complete developer product on a free tier of anything on the board. It's not a product for long documents. On those it didn't just score low, it lost most of the content.
Extend came fourth of eight, and its average tells you almost nothing useful, because it's the average of two very different performances. On one-page documents it was close to the top of the field. On documents of six pages or more it was near the bottom. We've rarely seen a product with a sharper cliff, and knowing where that cliff sits is the whole point of reading about it.
The good side really is good. Handwritten forms, photographed receipts, and pages that arrived rotated are where most systems wobble, and Extend handled them about as well as anything we tested short of DocuPipe. If your documents come off a scanner or a phone camera one page at a time, it deserves a serious look, and we wouldn't be surprised if it beat more expensive options on that material.
The bad side is length. On long catalogs, directories, and registers, Extend read the page and then returned a small fraction of the rows on it, without any warning that most were missing. On the longest documents it got closer to a third of the way through than all the way. Non-English documents were a second soft spot, and there was one odd stumble on a plain spreadsheet-style export that every other system handled perfectly. There's one mode and nothing to tune, which we like, but the cliff is real and it's silent.
It's easy to buy, which counts for more than it sounds. Pay-as-you-go is free to start with 10,000 credits, about 2,000 pages, then roughly six cents a page with no minimum. The $500 Scale plan brings that down to five cents. Everything is published, and there's no rate you have to ask for.
The developer experience is the strongest of the specialized products we looked at, and almost all of it is on the free tier. Studio is where you build and test a processor. An evaluation suite lets you regression-test extraction before you ship a change, which we wish more vendors offered. Workflows chain classify, split, and extract, and a review agent and human review step sit downstream. On the engineering side there's a date-versioned API with SDKs in Python, TypeScript, Java, and Go, webhooks with delivery logs, request logs, and a built-in test environment. Schemas are written by hand in Studio rather than drafted by an assistant, which is the one place a competitor does more for you.
The gaps are on the compliance side. A HIPAA BAA is a paid add-on on Scale, and SOC 2 isn't stated on the pricing page, so a regulated buyer should ask before assuming. Put it together and you get a strong page reader with a weak strategy for documents, wrapped in excellent tooling. The further your corpus is from one English page per file, the more the first part will show. The closer it is, the more the second part will win.
High volumes of short, scanned, photographed, rotated, or partly handwritten documents, mostly in English, run by a team that values evaluation tooling and a free tier with everything switched on.
Multi-page registers, statements, and catalogs, non-English corpora, regulated data without a BAA conversation, and any workflow where a silently incomplete result is worse than an error.
How it scores, area by area
The accuracy score comes from the benchmark. Every other score is ours, with the reason written next to it. We use the same weights on every review and comparison.
| Area | Extend |
|---|---|
| Accuracy35% of total | 8.0Ranked 4th of 8 systems on the benchmark. |
| Resilience15% of total | 5.0One mode and no tuning, but a hard cliff on long documents and one odd miss on a plain export file, all silent. |
| Price15% of total | 7.0About $0.06 per page pay-as-you-go, $0.05 on the $500 Scale plan, no minimum, and a generous free tier. |
| Getting started10% of total | 9.0Studio, evaluation suite, workflows and a test environment on a free tier of 10,000 credits with no card; schemas are authored by hand in Studio. |
| API and integration10% of total | 9.0Webhooks with delivery logs, five APIs, four SDKs, request logs and a test environment, all on the free tier. |
| Data control7.5% of total | 7.0Zero and custom retention policies offered; custom agreements on Scale. |
| Compliance7.5% of total | 5.0HIPAA BAA is a paid add-on; SOC 2 not stated on the pricing page. |
| Overallweighted | 7.3weighted score out of 10 |
How each area is scored
- Accuracy (35%). The benchmark result, on a 0 to 10 scale.
- Resilience (15%). Does it just work? Fewer modes to choose, no tuning to reach the ranked result, no runs that fail outright, and no documents that come back quietly empty. Informed by the benchmark, judged by us.
- Price (15%). Published cost per page for parse plus extraction, cheapest scoring highest. Unpublished pricing is marked down.
- Getting started (10%). How far you get without a sales call: a dashboard, a free tier with no card, help authoring schemas, a test environment.
- API and integration (10%). Webhooks and which tier they are on, SDKs, no-code connectors, whether the API is built around document jobs at all.
- Data control (7.5%). Deletion controls, scheduled retention, zero-retention availability and on which tier, choice of region.
- Compliance (7.5%). Certifications stated on public pages: SOC 2, ISO 27001, HIPAA with a BAA, GDPR, private deployment options.
By document type
Average accuracy on each group of benchmark documents. The evidence page has every document and score.
| Document type | Extend |
|---|---|
| Short forms, invoices, receiptsone page · 30 documents | 88.8% Good |
| Scans and photosimages, not PDFs · 7 documents | 86.9% Good |
| Statements, filings, reports2 to 5 pages · 21 documents | 86.7% Good |
| Non-English documents12 languages · 25 documents | 69.3% Mixed |
| Long registers, catalogs, directories6 pages and up · 21 documents | 61.7% Mixed |
Price, product, and policies
| Extend | |
|---|---|
| Pricing model | Credits. Extraction costs 3 credits per page plus 2 for the automatic parse, so 5 credits per page end to end. |
| Entry price | Pay-as-you-go is free to start with 10,000 credits, then $0.0125 per credit. Scale is $500/month for 50,000 credits at $0.01 per additional credit. |
| Cost per page | About $0.06 per page pay-as-you-go, $0.05 on Scale. |
| Free tier | Yes. 10,000 credits, roughly 2,000 pages, on signup. |
| Pay as you go | Yes. |
| Dashboard | Yes. Studio to build and test processors, an Evaluation suite for regression testing, Workflows that chain classify, split and extract, run logs, a Review Agent and human review, and a built-in test environment. |
| Webhooks | Yes, with webhook endpoint and delivery logs in the dashboard. |
| API and SDKs | Python, TypeScript, Java, Go and REST on a date-versioned API. Parse, Extract, Classify, Split and Edit APIs; API request logs in the dashboard. |
| Data retention | Zero and custom data retention policies offered; custom retention agreements on Scale and up. |
| Compliance | HIPAA BAA as a paid add-on on Scale. SOC 2 not stated on the pricing page. |
We checked these against the vendors' own pricing and documentation pages on 2026-09-11. Sources: Extend: www.extend.ai, docs.extend.ai. Prices change, so confirm before you budget.
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Frequently asked
Is Extend accurate for document extraction?
For single-page documents, yes. It was among the best of the eight systems we tested on scans, photos, and handwriting. For long documents, no. On registers and catalogs of six pages or more it returned only a fraction of the content and finished near the bottom.
How much does Extend cost?
Pay-as-you-go is free to start with 10,000 credits, then $0.0125 per credit. At 5 credits per page that's about six cents a page. The $500 Scale plan includes 50,000 credits and brings it to about five cents. HIPAA is a paid add-on.
Scores are macro-average field accuracy from the DocuBench 0.2.0, 72-document run. Every document, answer key, and raw extraction is open in the explorer; the scoring rules are on the methodology page, and the replication kit re-runs the scorer. A document a system could not process scores zero rather than being dropped.