You can call the Unstructured API with the Unstructured Python SDK and with standard REST clients (such as cURL and Postman). The Unstructured API provides two sets of programmatic operations:

• Transform operations enable you to programmatically automate the Unstructured Transform service. Transform quickly turns any locally hosted document into structured data that is ready for your apps, databases, vector stores, AI tools, and agents.
• Pipelines operations enable you to programmatically automate the Unstructured Pipelines service. Pipelines is primarily designed to turn remotely hosted documents and semi-structured data into structured data at scale for use by RAG and agentic AI. Pipelines is sold separately from Transform. To purchase Pipelines, contact Unstructured Sales.

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Benefits over open source

The Unstructured API provides the following benefits beyond the Unstructured open source library 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.
• 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.

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Pricing

To call the Unstructured API, you must have an Unstructured account. Unstructured offers different account types with different pricing plans:

•   Let’s Go and Pay-As-You-Go - A single user, with a single workspace, hosted alongside other accounts on Unstructured’s cloud infrastructure.
•   Business - Multiple users and workspaces, with three options:
  •   Business SaaS - Hosted alongside other accounts on Unstructured’s cloud infrastructure.
  •   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.
  •   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 page. To upgrade your account from Let’s Go or Pay-As-You-Go to Business, email Unstructured Sales at 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.

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Get support

For technical support, request support.

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Next steps