LlamaIndex
Verified Oct 15, 2026 ActiveOpen-source data framework for retrieval and agents, with LlamaParse as the paid document parsing, extraction and indexing service
Listed on EffectHub ·
Pricing
- Pricing model
- Freemium
- Paid options from
- $50/mo
- Billing
- Monthly
Open-source libraries are free. The hosted LlamaParse platform meters parsing, extraction and indexing in credits at $1.25 per 1,000: Free gives 10,000 credits a month with file upload only, Starter $50 a month includes 40,000 credits with pay-as-you-go to 400,000, Pro $500 includes 400,000 credits with usage to $5,000 a month, Enterprise is custom with volume discounts, SSO and private VPC. Basic parsing costs from one credit a page; agentic parsing costs more.
Use tool ↗About LlamaIndex
LlamaIndex started as an open-source Python and TypeScript framework for loading, chunking, indexing and querying private data for language-model applications, with connectors for files, databases and SaaS sources and a workflow layer for agents. The company sells LlamaParse, a hosted service that turns PDFs, scans and office documents into model-ready text and tables, extracts structured fields with extraction agents, classifies and splits files and builds searchable indexes, all metered in credits. The libraries are free to use commercially; the cloud service has a free tier of 10,000 credits a month and paid plans from $50 a month, with VPC and hybrid deployment for enterprises. It is aimed at developers building retrieval and document-automation pipelines.
- API
- Yes
- Last verified
- Oct 15, 2026
Verified sources
- Pricing page: Free $0 with 10K credits, Starter $50 a month with 40K credits and pay-as-you-go up to 400K, Pro $500 with 400K credits and usage to $5,000 a month, Enterprise custom with VPC and SSO; 1,000 credits = $1.25; basic parsing from one credit a page (15 October 2026)llamaindex.ai ↗
- Terms of service name LlamaIndex, Inc. as the provider for llamaindex.ai and cloud.llamaindex.ai, governed by Delaware law with disputes handled through JAMS (15 October 2026)llamaindex.ai ↗
- Company founded 1 April 2023 by Jerry Liu and Simon Suo in San Francisco after the open-source project began in November 2022; LlamaCloud launched March 2025; seed and Series A funding totalling about $27.5 million (15 October 2026)en.wikipedia.org ↗
Is LlamaIndex legit?
We don’t label tools safe or unsafe. Below are the records we checked ourselves, each with the date we read it.
- Domain registered
- May 12, 2023 (3 years ago)Registry record (RDAP), registrar NameCheap, Inc., looked up Sep 6, 2026
- TLS certificate
- Issued by Let's Encrypt, valid until Dec 4, 2026Seen in our own connection to the site on Oct 15, 2026
- Last checked
- Oct 15, 2026The site answered
- On the market since
- 2023The vendor's own material, read by us
- Operated by
- LlamaIndex, Inc., United StatesOur research, card verified Oct 15, 2026
Pros & cons of LlamaIndex
LlamaIndex is the pragmatic choice for a developer who wants retrieval over messy documents working this week: the open-source framework handles ingestion and querying, and LlamaParse does the hard part — tables, scans and layouts — as a paid API with a free tier large enough to prototype on. Teams that only need to chain model calls will find LangChain's ecosystem broader, and anyone parsing millions of pages should model the credit cost before committing, because agentic parsing multiplies the per-page rate.
Pros
- Open-source framework with commercial-friendly licensing and connectors for most file and data sources
- LlamaParse handles tables, multi-column layouts and scanned pages that plain text extractors mangle
- Free tier of 10,000 credits a month and a $50 Starter plan make the cost curve gentle at the start
- Enterprise options include private VPC and hybrid deployment, SSO and custom BAAs
Cons
- Credit pricing is opaque until you test: basic pages cost one credit, agentic and VLM parsing cost several times more
- The free tier allows file upload only, so connectors and external sources need a paid plan
- Rapid API and library changes mean tutorials and integrations go stale quickly
- Index limits (5 indexes, 50 files each on Free) are tight for anything beyond a demo
Best for
- Developers building retrieval-augmented answers over PDFs, contracts and reports with tables and scans
- Teams that want extraction of structured fields from documents without training their own layout models
- Startups prototyping on the free tier and growing into metered usage rather than a seat licence
Not for
- Non-developers looking for a ready-made chatbot or document viewer — this is a library and an API
- Very high-volume OCR where a per-page price from a dedicated OCR vendor is cheaper than credits
Watch out: The per-page cost depends on the parsing mode you choose; a pipeline that switches on layout-aware agentic parsing for scanned documents can use many times the credits of the one-credit basic mode, so set the mode per document type and watch the meter.
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