undatas.io• Sep 3, 2025• 1 min read
Show HN: Undatas.io – A pay-on-accept document parsing APIHey HN, Alex here, founder of undatas.io.Our journey started from a place of deep frustration with RAG (Retrieval-Augmented Generation). I was helping companies build internal knowledge bases on their own data, and the promise was huge. But in practice, the results were often mediocre. Important information was frequently missed during retrieval, and we kept hitting dead ends.After endless debugging, we realized the problem wasn't the LLM; it was classic "garbage in, garbage out." We traced the retrieval failures back to the very first step: document parsing.Whether we used open-source libraries or expensive paid APIs, the story was the same. Precision was lost. Key phrases, critical numbers, and entire table rows would just vanish during the parsing process. We spent countless hours manually comparing the original PDFs to the parsed output to find what went wrong. It was a soul-crushing, time-consuming nightmare.The biggest pain points were:1. Complex Tables: Most tools collapsed when