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AskYourPDF vs PDFtoChat

Two fact sheets from our own research, side by side — pricing, platforms, API access and status re-checked by us rather than quoted from the vendors. AskYourPDF publishes a starting price ($11.99); PDFtoChat does not. Both have a free tier. Only AskYourPDF ships a public API.

Side by side

FactAskYourPDFPDFtoChat
CategoryPDF ToolsChat with Documents & PDF
Pricing modelFreemiumFree
Starts at$11.99 month
Public APIYesNo
PlatformsWeb, iOS, Android, Chrome Ext, APIWeb
CompanyAskYourPDF
Launched2023
Last verifiedSep 6, 2026Sep 1, 2026

What our research says

AskYourPDF

A sensible pick when the job is repeatable question-answering across a document library rather than one clever answer, and the embeddable agent plus API are what separate it from the many ChatPDF clones. If you already live in Google's stack, NotebookLM covers the research half at no cost.

Pros

  • Page-level source citations instead of unattributed summaries
  • Documented API and Chrome extension, so it fits into existing workflows
  • Very large per-document page ceilings (2,500 on Premium, 6,000 on Pro)
  • Premium at $11.99/month billed yearly undercuts most document-chat rivals

Cons

  • Free tier is one document, three conversations and 50 questions per day
  • Advertised prices are annual-billing rates; monthly billing costs about 25% more
  • Daily rather than monthly quotas mean a heavy research day hits a hard wall
  • The 40-plus free writing tools are search-traffic surface, not the product

PDFtoChat

PDFtoChat does the single job of PDF question-answering competently and costs nothing, which makes it a reasonable pick for occasional use. It's a side project rather than a maintained product, so don't expect customer support, uptime guarantees, or new features on any schedule.

Pros

  • Free with no account limits mentioned
  • Open-source, so the retrieval pipeline is inspectable
  • Backed by real infrastructure sponsors (Together AI, Chroma) rather than an ad-hoc demo
  • Handles textbook and contract-length PDFs, not just short files

Cons

  • No company or support channel behind it, just an individual maintainer
  • As a side project, features and uptime aren't guaranteed long-term

Which one fits

Choose AskYourPDF if you need

  • Researchers querying large PDF sets and citing back to specific pages
  • Support teams embedding a chatbot trained on manuals and policy documents
  • Repeatedly filling the same non-fillable PDF forms from source records
  • Zotero users who want chat over their reference library

Choose PDFtoChat if you need

  • Occasional PDF Q&A without paying for a subscription
  • Developers curious about the underlying RAG stack, since the code is public

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