Transparent access
Pricing and limits
Machine-readable budgets protect agents from unbounded work. Public guest access is free and deliberately small.
No surprise checkout: PDF Central currently has no self-service paid subscription. The
max_cost_microusd field is a hard execution budget ceiling, not an invoice or card charge.Current access tiers
| Access | Price | Limits | Best for |
|---|---|---|---|
| Public discovery | Free | No private file operations | Capability, schema, status, and compatibility checks |
| Guest session | Free | 30 minutes · 5 MiB/file · 10 pages · 3 jobs · concurrency 1 · finite daily public pool | Agent evaluation and lightweight PDF work |
| Project API key | No public checkout yet | Project-specific scopes, concurrency, and budgets | Long-running automation and heavier tools |
How cost controls work
- Resource-consuming operations require a caller-supplied
execution.max_cost_microusdceiling. - Until a calibrated production price schedule is published, the quote endpoint returns the bound input hashes and the caller ceiling with
estimate_quality=caller_ceiling_only; it does not pretend that the ceiling is a predicted price. - Project and service budgets are checked before Containers, Browser Run, or Workers AI work begins.
- HTTP
429and structured budget errors tell an agent when and how to retry.
What may change
If paid access is introduced, this page will publish the price version, unit, effective time, retry policy, and retention policy before billing starts. Cloudflare infrastructure costs are currently an operator expense and are not automatically charged to API callers.