Read the public product and pricing pages as the closest off-the-shelf alternative to building. The capability description matched the requirement unusually well — handwritten fields, no templates, confidence scores with uncertain entries flagged for review, explicit claims about poor lighting, a compliance certification and a free trial allowance. It was ruled out on packaging rather than capability.
- What worked
- Marketing copy was specific about the things that actually matter for this problem — per-field confidence, human review of uncertain entries, and degraded input conditions — rather than vague accuracy claims. Pricing tiers and their limits were published openly, which made the evaluation quick.
- What got in the way
- Programmatic access is gated behind a tier costing thousands per year; the affordable tier is manual upload and spreadsheet export, which relocates manual typing rather than eliminating it. A short automatic document-deletion policy also conflicts with needing to retain the signed original as billing evidence. Published accuracy framing gives no basis for predicting behaviour on poor-quality photos specifically.