Capture every page.
Pay for none of them.

On clean 300 DPI print, Tesseract 5 is competitive. On degraded scans, dense forms and non-Latin scripts, ABBYY's engine still reads measurably better — we will not pretend otherwise. The answer for those documents is the hybrid path: Tesseract first, and low-confidence words or whole pages re-read by a vision model, local or remote, at your choice. The only way to settle it is a bake-off on your own documents — a paid engagement at our consulting rate, which is what we propose in every evaluation.

A platform licence for the deployment, not a meter on your documents. Above roughly 100,000–150,000 pages a year, self-hosting is decisively cheaper than a metered IDP service and the gap widens every year. Below that, a metered platform is often genuinely cheaper than running infrastructure — we will say so. Run the numbers on the pricing page.

No. Recognition can be entirely local: Tesseract for text, a local GGUF model for vision through a managed llama-server. Thirteen remote providers are supported for teams that want them, per project, with tokens and cost logged per tenant. An air-gapped install is a supported deployment, not a workaround.

If they speak eSCL (AirScan/Mopria) — which covers most networked MFPs and modern departmental scanners — yes, and the server drives them directly, so operators install nothing. Older production scanners that are TWAIN or ISIS only cannot be driven at all. That is a hardware fact, and we ask what is on your floor before the demo rather than after it.

Field sets, validation rules and export mappings are rebuilt here — the same work any migration between capture platforms requires, including ABBYY's own path from FlexiCapture to Vantage. What shortens it: six industry blueprints that provision a project, workflow, routing, upload endpoint, export goal and a full field set in one action, and model-assisted template authoring that drafts a template from one sample page. Blueprints ship pre-authored field sets, not pre-trained models — see the migration brief for what that means in weeks.

No. The 15-minute scanner and volume call is free, and so is the demo. The bake-off is paid work at our standard consulting rate, scoped and quoted before we start: someone reads your documents, authors templates, runs Tesseract, the hybrid path and the model path over them, and writes up field-level accuracy with the cost per thousand pages of each mode. It runs one to two consulting days — two is the ceiling, never a week. Pilots are quoted the same way, separately from the platform licence. You keep the report whatever it concludes — including when it concludes that a competitor reads your paper better.

KognitCapture is self-hosted and source-available to customers: there is no licence server that can switch your installation off, and an escrow or source arrangement is part of the standard enterprise conversation rather than an exception to it.