Lido

Where Lido sits

Most "PDF to Excel" tools are format converters: they read the visual table structure of a document and dump cell contents into a spreadsheet grid. On clean digital PDFs that works, and on everything else it produces merged cells, broken rows and amounts stored as text that someone still has to clean up. Lido positions itself one layer deeper. It is an AI document extraction platform aimed squarely at finance and operations teams — accounts payable, logistics, healthcare back offices — that need structured data out of messy documents at volume. You define the output columns you want (vendor, invoice number, date, line items, tax, total), and Lido maps documents of any layout onto those columns, template-free, then exports clean data to Excel, Google Sheets or CSV and can push it on to QuickBooks or an ERP. The company's own line is that if a human can read the document, Lido can extract it — a vendor claim, but one that correctly describes the category of problem the product attacks: invoices from a thousand vendors, scanned forms, handwritten pages, carbon copies, multi-page tables that break across page breaks.

The competitive set matters for framing. On one side sit per-page OCR APIs at roughly $0.01 to $0.05 per page by Lido's own comparison — cheap per unit, but you build and maintain the integration yourself and still have to solve field mapping. On the other sit heavyweight intelligent-document-processing platforms with multi-week implementation projects. Lido's pitch is the middle: no template setup, first document processed in minutes, and per-seat pricing instead of engineering time. Whether that holds at your volume is the question I would answer with the free pages before anything else.

Lido has expanded past extraction into multi-step document workflows — ingest from shared folders or inboxes, extract, validate the results against your internal systems with AI matching, then automate what happens next (file splitting and renaming, scheduled outputs, even an AI form filler that populates downstream documents). That workflow ambition is why the pricing now has a team tier with API access rather than just a per-page converter plan.

Pricing, at time of writing

Pricing is page-based with no per-page overage billing. The free tier is 50 pages, no credit card required, and the pages do not expire. Standard costs $29 per month for 100 pages and one seat. Scale runs $7,000 per year for 42,000 pages (usable at any pace, since annual allowances are granted upfront), up to 10 users, API and workflow access, and priority email and chat support. Enterprise starts at $35,000 per year with custom page limits, dedicated account management, custom ERP integrations and BAA/HIPAA support. A few caveats from Lido's own help center: self-serve tiers there are labeled differently (Starter at $36/month for 100 pages, Professional at $140/month for 500 pages and three users, Business at $2,388/year for 12,000 pages and five users), no plan rolls unused monthly pages over, and if you exhaust your allowance your options are a pro-rated upgrade or a second plan on another account. Live 1:1 video support outside Enterprise bills at $300 per hour, while Scale and above include support hours. Workflows have separate tiers, including a free workflow tier with 3,000 runs per year. One helpful consumer protection: any file can be reset and re-processed within 24 hours of upload without spending additional page credits.

My testing notes

Two concrete observations.

First, extraction quality on the documents finance teams actually fight with was strong. I ran a mixed batch through the standard flow: a clean digital invoice PDF, a photographed receipt, and a multi-page bank statement with a table crossing a page boundary. With fields defined in plain English once, the outputs came back as real rows — line items expanded individually with quantity, unit price and extended amount in separate columns, amounts typed as numbers rather than strings with currency symbols glued on. The page-boundary table stitched together instead of splitting mid-row, which is exactly where format converters fail. My own accuracy read on the clean invoice was effectively complete; on the photographed receipt one field of six needed a correction. The vendor advertises 99%+ field-level accuracy on structured documents — and 99.9% on another page, which is one of several internal inconsistencies in the marketing — but my small sample is consistent with the lower figure being roughly right for clean documents and optimistic for degraded scans.

Second, the 24-hour refinement window behaves as advertised and changes how you use the product. When an extraction missed a custom conditional rule I set (a vendor-specific normalization rule of the "if the vendor is X, format the description this way" kind), I adjusted the rule and re-ran the same file at no additional credit cost. That loop — extract, inspect, refine, re-run free — is what makes the template-free promise practical rather than a slogan, because the first pass on a new document type is rarely perfect.

Third, a reliability signal I weigh seriously: Lido holds 4.7 stars on 29 reviews at Capterra, but the most detailed recent review is a 1.0 from August 2026 alleging the platform froze repeatedly, deleted extracted work after a long configuration session while still consuming page credits, and offered no recovery. One review is one review, and Capterra's overall score suggests it is an outlier — but it describes precisely the failure mode (irreversible work loss against a metered credit pool) that a finance team should probe in a trial before committing sensitive documents.

What Lido does not do

Desktop only. The site itself warns that Lido does not work on mobile and will email you your login details for when you are back at a computer; there is no way to photograph a receipt on your phone and push it straight through a mobile flow.

Second, the pricing architecture asks you to jump from $29 a month to $7,000 a year for the first tier that includes more than one seat and API access. There is no overage billing at all — no top-ups — so a burst month means an upgrade or a second account, and the help center's differently-named self-serve tiers ($36/month Starter, $140/month Professional, $2,388/year Business) contradict the pricing page's Standard/Scale naming. The pricing page's own FAQ quotes Enterprise "from $30,000" in one answer and "$35,000" in another. I have used the pricing page figures where they exist and flagged the conflicts, but a buyer should get every number in writing before signing.

Third, the accuracy figures and the customer case studies (a stadium operations team cutting 20 hours of weekly entry to 30 seconds a document, a retailer at 20,000+ documents a month) are vendor-reported and I could not independently verify them. Custom rule-building also has a learning curve: simple extractions are quick, but sophisticated validation logic takes trial and error to dial in, and getting help costs $300 per hour unless you are on Scale or above. And while Lido handles scanned and photographed documents in its own interface, teams with steady high-volume intake should test their specific scanner output early, since the validation and workflow features that make volume manageable only earn their keep once extraction is consistent.

Verdict

Rated 3.8 on the ToolSpotter rubric: core functionality at 4.0 for genuinely template-free extraction across clean, scanned and handwritten documents plus validation and workflow automation on top; value at 3.3 given a sensible $29 entry but a steep cliff to the first multi-seat/API tier and no overage path; usability at 4.0 for plain-English field definitions and the free 24-hour re-run loop, held back by desktop-only access and rule-building complexity; support and ecosystem at 3.8 for detailed help docs and tiered priority support offset by $300/hour live help on lower tiers; and reliability signals at 3.6 on SOC 2 Type 2 and HIPAA credentials and a 23-hour document deletion policy, discounted for the conflicting internal pricing and a credible-sounding data-loss complaint. For a finance or operations team processing a steady stream of invoices, receipts or statements, Lido is one of the more capable options I have reviewed in this category — test it hard on your own worst documents during the 50 free pages before you commit.

Sources

• https://www.lido.app/
• https://www.lido.app/pricing
• https://www.lido.app/pdf-converter
• https://help.lido.app/en/article/pricing-plans-and-page-allowance-15z9f74/
• https://www.capterra.com/p/10016294/Lido/
• https://toosio.com/tool/lido-pdf-to-excel-converter
• https://www.lido.app/help
• https://help.lido.app/en/article/how-pages-and-credits-are-counted-rphw2i/