STELE vs Docsumo: The Invoice Extraction Cost Calculator Nobody Publishes

If you've priced out invoice OCR software in the last twelve months, you've seen the same pattern from every vendor: a small "starter" number on the website, a mandatory sales call, and a per-page rate that gets vague fast once you ask about your actual volume.

Docsumo is one of the better-known intelligent document processing (IDP) platforms in that market. It works. It has a real product, real customers, and a real UI. This isn't a takedown post — it's the honest math on when Docsumo is the right call for your accounts payable team, and when it isn't.

We'll cover:

1. What each platform actually does
2. Published and observed pricing
3. Where the cost comes from (and where it hides)
4. Accuracy claims vs. verifiable accuracy
5. When each is the right pick

If you're comparing IDP vendors for AP automation right now, you probably want the bottom-line calculator first. Here it is.

The math, up front

At a workload of 10,000 invoice pages per month — a typical mid-market AP team — here is what you pay each vendor for extraction alone. Numbers below are our best synthesis from published pricing pages, G2 reviews, Capterra pricing summaries, and buyer conversations at 2026 rates.

At the mid-market volume this category was built for, STELE is roughly 5–15x cheaper than the alternatives above, and the gap widens with volume.

Why is it that cheap? Because we built the entire pipeline on Cloudflare's edge — R2 for storage (zero egress fees), Workers for compute, Workers AI for embeddings and extraction, Vectorize for semantic search. There is no AWS bill quietly siphoning off margin on data movement. That's not a marketing framing — it's the reason our cost-to-serve is under a cent per page and everybody else's isn't.

Our cost model — every line item, every assumption — is available on request: email security@steledocs.com and we'll walk you through it, or share the relevant part of the source under NDA if you want to verify it yourself.

What each platform actually does

Docsumo is a template-assisted IDP platform focused on financial documents — invoices, bank statements, purchase orders, tax forms. You upload a document, Docsumo attempts extraction, and if the accuracy is low you correct fields in a review UI. Those corrections train a customer- specific model over time. It's a solid product with a mature review workflow and integrations into common ERPs.

STELE is a Cloudflare-native IDP platform with the same core loop — upload, extract, review, learn — plus a few architectural bets Docsumo hasn't made:

• Per-tenant few-shot memory. Every correction you make gets embedded into your tenant's own memory bank. On the next document, we retrieve your three most similar previously-corrected documents and inline their final JSON as few-shot examples to the model. Layout-specific accuracy compounds every time you use it. No templates to configure.
• Confidence-gated human review. The extractor emits a per-field confidence signal. Documents below threshold pause in a durable Cloudflare Workflow and land in a review inbox. High-confidence documents go straight through. You aren't reviewing every invoice — you're reviewing the ones the system is unsure about.
• Vision fallback for scans. When the PDF is a scan (near-empty text extraction), we auto-fall-back to a vision model with the same type-adaptive schemas. Crumpled shipping manifests and photographed invoices go through the same pipeline.
• Arithmetic-validated tiering. A 3B model detects document type, an 8B model does routine extraction. If the arithmetic doesn't add up (subtotal + tax ≠ total), we escalate to a 70B model automatically. A deterministic quality gate before we spend on the expensive model.

Every one of those is live and running in production.

Published pricing, side by side

Docsumo lists three plans:

• Free — 14-day trial, 1,000 pages
• Growth — pages per month, custom overage
• Enterprise — custom, mandatory sales call

The Growth plan's published price varies by region and volume. Public buyer reports pin it in the range of $500–1,500/month for baseline volumes and $3,000+ once you approach 10k pages. Setup fees are quoted separately "based on complexity of processing" — a variable the buyer can't control because complexity is defined post-sale.

STELE lists three plans:

• Free — 100 pages per month, no credit card
• Pro — $49/mo, 1,000 pages
• Team — $199/mo, 10,000 pages
• Enterprise — custom arrangements built on top of Team (SSO, dedicated support, custom connectors) — no fixed public price, because the shape of it genuinely varies by what you need. Talk to sales@steledocs.com.

No setup fees. No page-complexity surcharge. No unused-credit expiration. You can see the plans and start processing today.

Where the cost hides

Every IDP vendor has line items that don't make it onto the pricing page. The three that surprise buyers most in the AP space:

1. Rejected pages. Docsumo (and most competitors) charge for every page attempted, including ones where extraction failed. If your document mix includes 15% low-quality scans, you're paying for extraction you didn't get. STELE doesn't charge for rejected extractions — the _parseError flag rolls back the page count.

2. Correction volume. Review time is where AP teams actually spend money. If you're correcting 30% of extractions, your $2,000/mo software bill is dwarfed by 40 hours/month of AP clerk time. What you want is not "cheaper OCR" — it's accuracy that gets better every week. That's where the per-tenant few-shot memory story matters more than the per-page rate.

3. ERP write-back. Rossum charges for the NetSuite / SAP connector separately. Docsumo bundles it into Enterprise. STELE is API-first — every capability (upload, extraction, search) is a documented REST endpoint you can call from QuickBooks, NetSuite, SAP, or your own scripts today; native one-click write-back connectors for specific ERPs are on our roadmap, not yet shipped.

Accuracy claims, and how to actually verify

Every vendor in this space claims "99% accuracy." The honest number is always lower than the marketing page and always depends on your document mix. What you should ask for in a pilot:

1. Per-tenant accuracy trend over the pilot window. Any vendor can cherry-pick a good week — you want to see the trend line.
2. Confidence distribution. How many docs go straight through vs. land in review? This is the number that predicts your AP clerk's actual workload.
3. Correction feedback loop. When you correct a field, do subsequent documents get better at that field? Or does the correction die in a log file?

STELE surfaces exactly this in-product, not as a one-time demo number: the quality dashboard reads per-document-type confidence and correction rates from the same telemetry the model calls emit, updated as you use it. Nobody else in this category exposes that number to the customer directly. We're happy to lose deals on numbers you can check yourself because that's the game we chose to play.

When Docsumo is the right pick

Not sarcastic — real cases where Docsumo wins on more than momentum:

• You already have a paid Docsumo contract with a year to go, and the switching cost outweighs 12 months of margin. Renew and re-evaluate next cycle.
• You need a specific integration (say, Zoho Books) that Docsumo has today and STELE hasn't shipped yet.
• Your data cannot leave AWS for regulatory reasons and you can't justify moving to a Cloudflare-native vendor. This is rare, but real in some healthcare and defense verticals.

For anyone else running mid-market AP: at the volumes this category was built for, you are meaningfully overpaying and the accuracy story isn't better.

When STELE is the right pick

If you're one of these teams, we should talk:

• Mid-market controller, 50–500 FTE, running QuickBooks or NetSuite, processing 5k–20k invoices/month, tired of your current IDP bill.
• Freight or logistics ops team processing bills of lading and proof- of-delivery documents — often scanned, sometimes crumpled. The vision fallback matters here.
• Legal ops team who needs contract extraction plus normal AP — our Team plan includes both under one number.
• Anyone building on Cloudflare who wants an IDP pipeline that actually runs on the same edge you do.

What to do next

1. Try Free tier — 100 pages/month, no credit card. Enough to run last month's ten weirdest invoices through and see the confidence + accuracy numbers for yourself.
2. Or apply to our design partner program — an extended Team-plan trial, hands-on onboarding, and a locked-in discount, in exchange for direct feedback while we build.
3. Have a specific claim on this page you want to verify against the source? Email security@steledocs.com and we'll arrange access to the relevant part of the codebase under NDA.

We are not the IDP for every buyer. We are the IDP for the buyer who wants to see the numbers, doesn't want to pay the hyperscaler tax, and believes accuracy should compound with usage instead of decaying with model drift.

If that's you, come look at what we built.

Have a document type we should benchmark against? Reply to sales@steledocs.com and we'll process a batch and publish the numbers side by side.