# Unlimited OCR

Hacker Approved page: https://hackerapproved.com/p/unlimited-ocr/

6 people recommended Unlimited OCR in Hacker News comments, 1 had mixed feelings and none criticized it, November 2025 to October 2026. It was recommended in 3 of 12 months, in 4 threads. It does not meet the Hacker Approved badge rule.

3 of the 6 people who recommend it commented in one thread, “Unlimited OCR: One-Shot Long-Horizon Parsing”.

**Verdict:** Recommended for reading very long documents in one pass with a clever sliding-window attention design, and essentially free to run on a decent computer.

Summary written by Claude from 7 comments.

## Why people recommend it

- Clever attention design for long documents (2 comments in the sample): "I also think the attention approach (always attend to the image/prefix, with a sliding window for local context) is neat!" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48654438)) "found a clever architectural hack to stop AI from hoarding memory when reading long documents" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48643871))
- Good results in people's own testing (2 comments in the sample): "it seems to be working very well from the small parts I have double checked" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48647286)) "the 'Unlimited OCR' model is very good" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48740641))
- Competitive with Mistral OCR (2 comments in the sample): "This looks more promising than what Mistral just launched" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48647872)) "I gave it a whirl and it does seem pretty competitive" ([source](https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=48786469))

## Other OCR models people recommend

- [Mistral OCR](https://hackerapproved.com/p/mistral-ocr/): 47 recommend, 17 mixed, 33 criticize
- [PaddleOCR](https://hackerapproved.com/p/paddleocr/): 14 recommend, 3 mixed, 4 criticize
- [GLM-OCR](https://hackerapproved.com/p/glm-ocr/): 11 recommend, 4 mixed, 3 criticize
- [DeepSeek-OCR](https://hackerapproved.com/p/deepseek-ocr/): 10 recommend, 1 mixed, 4 criticize

## The badge

A product earns the Hacker Approved badge when at least 10 people recommend it, recommenders outnumber critics at least 2 to 1 (mixed feelings count toward neither side), it was recommended in at least 4 of the 12 months and in at least 5 different threads, and no single thread supplies more than half of the people who recommend it. Health and money products are never badged.

## Cite as

Hacker Approved, "Unlimited OCR", https://hackerapproved.com/p/unlimited-ocr/ (6 recommend, 1 mixed, 0 criticize; Hacker News comments, November 2025 to October 2026).

Counts updated 2 Nov 2026, with data through October 31, 2026.