PDF.ai lets you chat with any PDF: ask questions, get summaries and find answers inside the document. The same service offers an API for developers that parses documents into structured JSON, extracts custom fields such as names, dates and amounts, and splits PDFs into sections. Advanced OCR and layout detection capture headings, paragraphs, tables and figures. A free plan includes 200 credits per month, and paid API plans run $49 a month for Starter, $99 for Pro, $249 for Scale and $599 for Growth.
Two groups use it. Students, researchers and professionals who read long reports can upload a file and question it in plain language rather than scanning pages. Developers and operations teams building document workflows use the REST API, which needs only an API key and a URL, with no SDK to install. Finance, legal and back-office teams that must pull figures and dates out of piles of PDFs can set up repeatable extraction, and hobbyists can test ideas on the free tier without a credit card.
A student can upload a textbook chapter and ask for a summary or a specific answer. A developer can send an invoice URL to the parse endpoint and receive markdown and structured contents with a page count back, then call the ask endpoint with a prompt about the same document. An accounting team can extract totals and dates from supplier statements, and a publisher can split a long PDF into sections that the AI detects automatically. Responses arrive in under five seconds for most documents, and files are deleted after processing.
