Document recognition API¶

Turn a photo of a passport or ID into structured data with one HTTP call. The API is synchronous: you send an image and the extracted fields come back in the same response. Each answer carries a confidence score and the checks the engine ran.

You can call it right now, without an account, using the public sandbox key sk_sandbox_public. It recognizes the document you send, free of charge, for a limited number of documents and up to 10 requests per hour per IP.

Try it in one call¶

This runs as written. The image in it is a one-pixel placeholder, so the answer is a 200 reporting no_document_found. Put a base64-encoded photograph of a document in its place and the fields come back:

curl -X POST https://api.doc.cheap/v1/scans \
  -H "Authorization: Bearer sk_sandbox_public" \
  -H "Content-Type: application/json" \
  -d '{"image":"/9j/4AAQSkZJRgABAQEASABIAAD/2wBDAAgGBgcGBQgHBwcJCQgKDBQNDAsLDBkSEw8UHRofHh0aHBwgJC4nICIsIxwcKDcpLDAxNDQ0Hyc5PTgyPC4zNDL/wAALCAABAAEBAREA/8QAFAABAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAACf/EABQQAQAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAAD/2gAIAQEAAD8AKp//2Q=="}'

The base URL https://api.doc.cheap is the host the OpenAPI servers block names. Your first recognition does the same call with your own document, in curl, JavaScript or Python, and reads every field that comes back.

The four sections¶

• Get started — your first call, then a key of your own.
• Guides — one page per task, from recognizing a passport to tracking what you spend.
• Reference — the exact contract: endpoints, response shapes, fields, options, errors and limits.
• Concepts — why the API behaves the way it does.

Start here¶

• Your first recognition — one call, and what comes back.
• What a billed scan is — the rule that decides whether a call is charged at all.
• Recognize a passport — the full request, every option, and how to read the result.
• Errors — one page per error code, with the cause and the fix.
• Changelog — dated list of changes, with a feed.

For AI coding agents¶

Machine-readable copies of this site live at /llms.txt (a short index) and /llms-full.txt (every page as one markdown file). Any page is also available as bare markdown at its .md address, for example /start/first-recognition.md.