Overview

The Unstructured Partition Endpoint, part of the Unstructured API, is intended for rapid prototyping of Unstructured’s various partitioning strategies, with limited support for chunking. It is designed to work only with processing of local files, one file at a time. Use the Unstructured Workflow Endpoint for production-level scenarios, file processing in batches, files and data in remote locations, generating embeddings, applying post-transform enrichments, using the latest and highest-performing models, and for the highest quality results at the lowest cost.

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Get started

To call the Unstructured Partition Endpoint, you need an Unstructured account and an Unstructured API key:

1. Sign in to your Unstructured account:

   • If you do not already have an Unstructured account, go to https://unstructured.io/contact and fill out the online form to indicate your interest.
   • If you already have an Unstructured account, go to https://platform.unstructured.io and sign in by using the email address, Google account, or GitHub account that is associated with your Unstructured account. The Unstructured user interface (UI) then appears, and you can start using it right away.

2. Get your Unstructured API key:

   a. In the Unstructured UI, click API Keys on the sidebar.
   b. Click Generate API Key.
   c. Follow the on-screen instructions to finish generating the key.
   d. Click the Copy icon next to your new key to add the key to your system’s clipboard. If you lose this key, simply return and click the Copy icon again.
   

Try the quickstart.

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Pricing

Unstructured offers three account pricing plans:

• SaaS Cloud-hosted - Processing happens on Unstructured’s software-as-a-service (SaaS) cloud infrastructure in a multi-tenant environment.
• Hybrid SaaS - Processing also happens on Unstructured’s SaaS cloud infrastructure, but your data stays protected in a dedicated cloud environment, maintaining strict data privacy.
• VPC - Sometimes referred to as self-hosted, an instance of the Unstructured SaaS is deployed into your own virtual private cloud (VPC), providing complete data ownership and infrastructure control, full customization, and dedicated technical support.

For more details, see the Unstructured Pricing page.

Some of these plans are billed 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.

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Quickstart

This example uses the curl utility on your local machine to call the Unstructured Partition Endpoint. It sends a source (input) file from your local machine to the Unstructured Partition Endpoint which then delivers the processed data to a destination (output) location, also on your local machine. Data is processed on Unstructured-hosted compute resources.

If you do not have a source file readily available, you could use for example a sample PDF file containing the text of the United States Constitution, available for download from https://constitutioncenter.org/media/files/constitution.pdf.

export UNSTRUCTURED_API_URL=<your-unstructured-api-url>
export UNSTRUCTURED_API_KEY="<your-unstructured-api-key>"

curl --request 'POST' \
"$UNSTRUCTURED_API_URL" \
--header 'accept: application/json' \
--header "unstructured-api-key: $UNSTRUCTURED_API_KEY" \
--header 'content-Type: multipart/form-data' \
--form 'content_type=string' \
--form 'strategy=vlm' \
--form 'vlm_model_provider=openai' \
--form 'vlm_model=gpt-4o' \
--form 'output_format=application/json' \
--form 'files=@<path/to/file>;type=application/pdf'

You can also call the Unstructured Partition Endpoint by using the Unstructured Python SDK or the Unstructured JavaScript/TypeScript SDK.