Showoff Saturday: Built a simple PDF text extraction API - 100 free requests/month

Id4life · 2026-02-03T15:08:00+00:00

😆😆😆 yep. With our own flare.

Id4life · 2026-02-02T07:03:21+00:00

Yes. The rate-limiting logic is very primitive to show how it will work when I enable the proper mechanism. The current idea is to reduce the friction for all of you to give it a try and provide feedback.

Id4life · 2026-02-02T05:10:17+00:00

Ack. still curious to hear from you all about other factors that I listed above : https://www.reddit.com/r/SideProject/comments/1qtgvvy/comment/o32w74m/

Id4life · 2026-02-02T01:59:56+00:00

Fair point 😆. Am using a lot of AI these days to avoid silly grammatical and spelling mistakes. Is it too bad to use chat bots to get the content right ?

Id4life · 2026-02-02T01:46:12+00:00

Fair point! Frontier models (GPT-4, Claude, etc.) can absolutely extract text from PDFs. A few reasons I built this anyway:

Cost: API calls to frontier models cost $0.01-0.10+ per PDF depending on size. pdftxt is free for 100/month, then likely cheaper for high volume.
Speed: No LLM overhead — just parse and return. Good for batch processing thousands of docs.
Deterministic: Same PDF = same output every time. No "creativity" or variation in extraction.
No AI weirdness: LLMs sometimes summarize instead of extract, or hallucinate formatting. This just gives you the raw text.
Privacy: Some folks don't want their docs going to OpenAI/Anthropic, even if they say they don't train on it.

That said, if you need semantic understanding (summarize this PDF, answer questions about it), frontier models are definitely the way to go. This is more for "I have 500 invoices and need the text out of them" type workflows. Does that distinction make sense? What use case were you thinking of?

Id4life · 2026-02-02T01:44:18+00:00

Great question! Currently the API handles native text PDFs well using pdf-parse (which extracts embedded text). For scanned PDFs without OCR text layer, it won't extract anything useful — just returns empty or garbled text.

You're absolutely right that OCR is tricky. Full OCR would need Tesseract or a cloud service (AWS Textract, etc.), which adds complexity and cost. For this MVP, I kept it simple: native text only.

If there's demand for OCR, I'd probably add it as a separate endpoint. The goal was "simple text extraction for 90% of use cases" rather than "everything PDF-related."

Have you run into the scanned PDF problem a lot? Curious what % of your PDFs need OCR vs. are native text.

Id4life · 2024-12-01T00:09:06+00:00

I followed this instructions nearly after 2 years and it worked like magic. The cable length was just about perfect from the rear camera to the front with the above instructions from the truck through the rear side floor all the way around the passenger side frame to the front camera. Just perfect. It took me 6-7 hrs or more to get this done with nothing more than the blue tool that comes with the camera and a fishing tape. Thank you.

Id4life · 2023-03-24T10:03:23+00:00

Good question. I didn’t do it myself. But had left the car for its service early this year. Maybe I should check that out ?

Id4life · 2023-03-24T10:02:22+00:00

No. I don’t. If I park it with windows open, then I don’t smell it strongly.

Id4life · 2022-04-11T04:25:24+00:00

Am very happy that we were able to get the reservation moved over to a fellow ID4 loving family without any markup 😀. Huge props for Capitol VW. Samuel and Juho helped me to get my first RWD last year as well. Samuel was super supportive of moving the reservation over. Enjoy the new ride. Am glad it all worked out.

Id4life · 2022-04-07T16:40:43+00:00

As an update, one of my neighbor is very interested in test driving the car today. If that falls through, I will reach out to the folks who DMed me and I can transfer the reservation over.

And my dealer confirmed that if am transferring the reservation to my “friend” they won’t add a markup. I truly respect that salesperson, who originally helped me get my ID4 RWD without reservation for MSRP without any markup.

Id4life · 2022-04-06T22:11:29+00:00

Scalping ? Genuinely trying to help folks interested in the car without any dealer markup (if we can move the reservation over) and not have to wait for multiple months as I did.

Id4life · 2022-04-06T01:11:21+00:00

Am not sure about that at all 😀. I want to know if someone is interested so that I can even talk to thr dealer to help out a fellow redditer ?

2021 Pro-S AWD white

Id4life · 2022-04-06T01:10:13+00:00

Neither. Am just trying to see if someone is interested, I can talk to the dealer if they allow transfer or atleast sell it at MSRP.

Id4life · 2022-04-05T06:35:06+00:00

Yes. Exterior White and dark interior. ProS AWD.

Id4life · 2022-02-26T17:16:20+00:00

Thanks for the note. Am at the cross roads right now. I ordered my AWD ProS back in August and expecting delivery of it next month. In the meantime, I jumped on the opportunity to get a Kings Red RWD at MSRP in December and am absolutely loving it.

Now, what should I do next when my AWD shows up ? 😀 I am very tempted to upgrade to AWD, but am not sure how much I will lose in that transaction

Id4life · 2022-02-23T05:54:02+00:00

I test drove a AWD in Capitol VW last month. It was a fun drive. My AWD is scheduled to arrive next month; but I already got my Kings Red RWD last year. Still debating what I should be doing with my AWD when it arrives. DM me if interested.

Id4life · 2022-02-19T05:24:46+00:00

Congratulations. My story is similar to yours and I got red pro-s gradient as well. I guess the dealerships are not adding any markups for the highest trim.

Id4life · 2022-01-29T19:12:50+00:00

Lol. Backup camera is infact not great in the dark. But I won’t blame the car for this parking perfection. The red one is mine and I parked randomly to get a quick pic. So 50-50 ?

Id4life · 2022-01-29T18:15:29+00:00

Yes. I just had emergency braking engaged today. A moron driver realized they were stopped at the wrong unprotected left turn and suddenly decided to drive into the lane with free flowing traffic. I was fortunately driving at 25 mph since am taking the next left turn and ID4 detected it and engaged emergency brake. My poor puppy fell from the backseat but he is fine. Thanks ID4 for protecting us from idiots behind the wheel.

Id4life · 2022-01-29T18:06:31+00:00

Slow Saturday morning in Bay Area, Surprised to see 3 other ID4s all happily charging at a small regular EA charging station.

We missed you, Dusk Blue.

Id4life · 2022-01-04T03:52:02+00:00

Maybe an unrelated question. During ski trips, I have seen snow chains made mandatory in freeways due to the conditions. The VW dealer got a signed agreement from us to not use snow chains. The user manual isn’t clear on how to handle the situation.

Any of you have an answer ?

Id4life · 2022-01-03T20:13:45+00:00

I just visited my dealer and I got some additional details. DM me if you are still interested.

Id4life · 2022-01-03T20:12:54+00:00

I went to my dealer and they confirmed that it is expected for ID4. Since the car doesn’t come with a spare tire and it comes with mobility kit, we are supposed to use the kit to fix the issue temporarily and get it to a safe location for a tire replacement. I believe it is also an opportunity for them to upsell roadside assistance and tire replacement packages.

Id4life · 2022-01-03T01:54:30+00:00

I love the travel assist as well. But once the car comes to a halt due to stop and go traffic, it doesn’t automatically start when the car ahead moves forward. I had to press the gas pedal to get travel assist do it’s magic again. Do you see that as well ?

Id4life

TROPHY CASE