Pro or Business? How to Tell Which One You Actually Need

Most pricing pages are built to move you up a tier. This one is built to get you on the right one, including when the right one is the cheaper one.

There is a single question that separates ScanThisText's Pro and Business plans, and it is not "how much do you scan?" Both plans scan without limit. It is this:

Does a document you photograph eventually need to become money, or a filing, or a record someone else can audit?

If a scan ends when the text is in your clipboard, you want Pro. If a scan is the first step in something — an invoice going out, a bill going into your books, a claim going into a file — you want Business.

Everything below is elaboration on that one line.

What Pro is for

Pro is the plan for a person whose problem is retyping.

You photograph a page and you need what is on it: a paragraph out of a book, a serial number off the back of a machine, a passage of a contract you want to search, a menu in a language you do not read. Pro gives you unlimited scans and translations, asking your documents questions in plain English, automatic classification, forever retention, and export to PDF, CSV or text.

That is a complete product for a large number of people. Researchers, students, writers, translators, anyone who reads more than they bill. If your relationship with a document ends when you have read it, Pro is not a stepping stone to anything — it is the plan.

What Business adds, and why it costs more

Business is the plan for a person whose problem is what happens after the retyping.

The additions are not "more of Pro". They are a different job:

• QuickBooks Online push. A scanned supplier invoice becomes a Bill in your books, with the original PDF attached to it, without a second upload.
• Pay-by-card invoice links. Send an invoice, take a card payment against your own connected processor account, and have the paid ones reconcile themselves.
• Azure AI structured extraction. Not "here is the text" but "here is the vendor, the invoice number, the date, the line items and the total, as fields" — 100 documents a month on the plan, then metered.
• Four specialised readers. Invoices, medical paperwork, contracts and insurance forms each go through a processor built for that layout rather than one general model guessing.
• A webhook. Every finished extraction can POST straight into whatever else you run.
• An audit log. Who did what, to which document, when.
• Bulk upload at twenty files rather than five.

Every one of those exists because a document had somewhere to go afterwards. If your documents do not have somewhere to go afterwards, you are being asked to pay for plumbing you will never connect.

Four tests that say you are on the wrong plan

Skip the feature grid. These are faster.

1. The re-keying test. After a scan, do you open a second piece of software and type some of what you just extracted into it? If yes, at any frequency, Business's push and webhook are aimed exactly at that keystroke. If no, they are aimed at nobody.

2. The Friday test. Do you have a recurring block of admin — invoicing, filing, expense entry — that you do in a batch because doing it one at a time is too annoying? A batch means the friction is real and measurable. Business removes friction from the sending end, which is what makes one-at-a-time possible.

3. The "prove it" test. Has anyone in the last two years — an accountant, an insurer, a client, a tax authority — asked you to show when a document was received or what was done with it? If so, the audit log is not a compliance nicety, it is the thing you spent a weekend reconstructing from email.

4. The fields test. When you extract from a document, do you want the words, or do you want the fields? "Total: $1,247.50" as a labelled value is a different product from a wall of text with $1,247.50 somewhere in it. Only one of those flows into software without a human.

Two or more yeses means Business will pay for itself in ordinary weeks, not exceptional ones. Zero yeses means Pro, and anyone who tells you otherwise is selling.

The money question, honestly

Business is the more expensive plan, and whether it is worth it depends on volume — but not scan volume. Invoice volume.

If you send invoices and pay a per-transaction platform percentage today, the arithmetic is unusually clean, because a flat plan replaces a variable cost. Somewhere around a handful of invoices a month at typical trade values, the percentage you stop paying covers the plan, and past that point the plan is free and then some. We wrote out that break-even calculation in What a 1% Platform Fee Actually Costs a One-Person Business.

If you do not send invoices at all, none of that applies and the plan is a straight cost. Judge it on the four tests above instead.

Moving down is allowed

Plans are month to month. If you upgrade for a busy quarter — a renovation season, a claims surge, a year-end — and then go quiet, move back down. Your history does not evaporate; scans stay where they are.

This is worth saying out loud because a surprising number of people stay on a plan they have outgrown in the other direction, paying for a QuickBooks connection they disconnected in March. Set a reminder to look at it twice a year. Nobody else will.

If you are still not sure

Start on the cheaper one.

Pro answers the question "can this thing read my documents well enough", which is the real risk. Once you know the extraction is good, the Business decision becomes a plumbing decision, and plumbing decisions are easy to make with a seven-day trial and a real invoice.

Both plans are laid out side by side on the plans page, and the Business page shows what the additions actually do rather than what they are called.