> ## Documentation Index
> Fetch the complete documentation index at: https://docs.unstructured.io/llms.txt
> Use this file to discover all available pages before exploring further.

# Overview

<Tip>
  To start using the Unstructured API right away, skip ahead to the [quickstart](/api-reference/quickstart) now!
</Tip>

The Unstructured API provides a set of programmatic operations that enable you to have Unstructured:

* Perform a full range of partitioning, enrichment, chunking, and embedding of your files and data, producing results that are AI-ready.
* Batch-process files locally; and batch-process files and data that are stored in remote storage locations, databases, and vector stores.
* Retrieve batch-processed local file results locally as well; and send batch-processed remote file or data results to remote storage locations, databases, and vector stores.
* Use the latest and highest-performing models.

<Frame caption="An example of the Unstructured API, showing the code to process a local file on demand">
  <img src="https://mintcdn.com/unstructured-53/HIy1tdX-YgPq1b1H/img/welcome/api.png?fit=max&auto=format&n=HIy1tdX-YgPq1b1H&q=85&s=33a4944ecb1c94b25e5a70f0c4723089" alt="Unstructured API example" width="547" height="635" data-path="img/welcome/api.png" />
</Frame>

# Benefits over open source

The Unstructured API provides the following benefits beyond the [Unstructured open source library](/open-source/introduction/overview) offering:

* Designed for production scenarios.
* Significantly increased performance on document and table extraction.
* Access to newer and more sophisticated vision transformer models.
* Access to Unstructured's fine-tuned OCR models.
* Access to Unstructured's by-page and by-similarity chunking strategies.
* Adherence to security and SOC 2 Type 1, SOC 2 Type 2, HIPAA, GDPR, ISO 27001, FedRAMP, and CMMC 2.0 Level 2 compliance standards. For details, see the [Unstructured Trust Portal](https://trust.unstructured.io/).
* Authentication and identity management.
* Incremental data loading.
* Image extraction from documents.
* More sophisticated document hierarchy detection.
* Unstructured manages code dependencies, for instance for libraries such as Tesseract.
* Unstructured manages its own infrastructure, including parallelization and other performance optimizations.

[Learn more](/open-source/introduction/overview#limits).

## Pricing

To call the Unstructured API, you must have an Unstructured account.

Unstructured offers different account types with different pricing plans:

* <Icon icon="person" />  **Let's Go** and **Pay-As-You-Go** - A single user, with a single workspace, hosted alongside other accounts on Unstructured's cloud infrastructure.
* <Icon icon="building" />  **Business** - Multiple users and workspaces, with three options:

  * <Icon icon="people-group" />  **Business SaaS** - Hosted alongside other accounts on Unstructured's cloud infrastructure.
  * <Icon icon="shield-halved" />  **Dedicated instance** - Hosted within a virtual private cloud (VPC) running inside Unstructured's cloud infrastructure. Dedicated instances are isolated from all other accounts, for additional security and control.
  * <Icon icon="shield" />  **In-VPC** - Hosted within your own VPC on your own cloud infrastructure.

  **Business** accounts also allow for robust customization of Unstructured's features for your unique needs.

For more details, see the [Unstructured Pricing](https://unstructured.io/pricing) page.

To upgrade your account from **Let's Go** or **Pay-As-You-Go** to **Business**,
email Unstructured Sales at [sales@unstructured.io](mailto:sales@unstructured.io).

Some of these plans have billing details that are determined on a per-page basis.

Unstructured calculates a page as follows:

* For these file types, a page is a page, slide, or image: `.pdf`, `.pptx`, and `.tiff`.
* For `.docx` files that have page metadata, Unstructured calculates the number of pages based on that metadata.
* For all other file types, Unstructured calculates the number of pages as the file's size divided by 100 KB.
* For non-file data, Unstructured calculates a page as 100 KB of incoming data to be processed.

## Get support

For technical support for Unstructured accounts, email Unstructured Support at [support@unstructured.io](mailto:support@unstructured.io).

## Learn more

* <Icon icon="blog" />  [Unstructured API: All Unstructured Enterprise ETL Functionality for Your MCP Integrations](https://unstructured.io/blog/unstructured-api-all-unstructured-enterprise-etl-functionality-for-your-mcp-integrations)