PaddleOCR-VL is listed under AI OCR & Document Extraction, in the Research & Learning category on Flocci AI Tools. 1B-parameter document parsing VLM (NaViT encoder + ERNIE-4.5-0.3B). It is free, with no paid plan attached, and it lives at github.com.
PaddleOCR-VL is listed as fully free — there is no paid tier attached to it in the catalog. That makes it one of the 399 entries on Flocci AI Tools with no upgrade path built in.
PaddleOCR-VL does 4 things the catalog singles out: 1b-parameter document parsing vlm (navit encoder + ernie-4.5-0.3b); handles text, tables, formulas, charts and handwriting; supports 109 languages including hindi and arabic; apache 2.0; newer paddleocr-vl-1.6 available.
DeepSeek-OCR is the closest free alternative: it sits in the same AI OCR & Document Extraction sub-category and is free. Docling, Dolphin (ByteDance) and dots.ocr (dots.mocr) also start free. The full list is on the alternatives page.
See the full list →