An n8n community node for doc.cheap: it reads a photo or scan of a passport, national ID card or driving licence and returns the printed fields – name, date of birth, document number, expiry, the machine-readable zone – as structured workflow data.

One recognised document costs one credit, $0.01. Registering gives 100 free documents every month. An unreadable image, an empty frame or an unsupported document type costs nothing, and every answer says whether it was billed.

Installation · Credentials · Operations · Compatibility · Usage · Resources · Version history

Installation

Follow the installation guide in the n8n community nodes documentation. In the n8n editor: Settings → Community Nodes → Install, then enter:

@doc-cheap/n8n-nodes-doc-cheap

Credentials

Create a doc.cheap API credential.

API Key – a live key (sk_live_…) from the doc.cheap cabinet, or the public sandbox key sk_sandbox_public to try the node without an account. The sandbox key gives 10 free recognised documents per address in all, and at most 10 requests per address an hour, whatever their answer.
Base URL – leave it at https://api.doc.cheap.

n8n tests the credential by reading the balance, which spends nothing.

Operations

Scan

Scan Document – recognises the image in an input binary field (JPEG or PNG). Options: the country you expect (a three-letter code such as GRC), your own reference, an idempotency key (sending the same key again returns the first answer instead of charging a second scan), how many hours the result can be read back, and whether to return the holder's photo crop.
Get – reads back a stored scan result, picked from a list or by its ID.
Get Many – lists the account's stored scans, newest first, with Return All or a Limit.
Delete – deletes a stored scan result for good.

Account

Get Balance – this month's free credits, the paid credits, the credits spent and this period's scan counters. With the public sandbox key there is no account behind the call, so the balance comes back empty.

Simplify. Scan Document and Get return a flat summary by default: the scan ID, status, confidence, whether it was billed, your reference, the document kind, country, number and expiry, and the holder's surname, given names, date of birth, sex and nationality. Turn Simplify off for the full answer – per-field readings, the machine-readable zone, image crops, quality and authenticity checks.

Stored results. A result is stored only when the scan was made with a live key under a non-zero retention window, and only until that window ends. Under a sandbox key nothing is stored, so Get Many returns nothing and Get or Delete find nothing. None of Get, Get Many, Delete or Get Balance charges a credit.

The node can also be used as a tool by an n8n agent node.

Compatibility

Built with @n8n/node-cli and n8n-workflow 2.x. Tested with n8n 2.41.5. The package has no runtime dependencies.

Usage

A typical workflow: a trigger that receives a file (a form upload, an e-mail attachment, a cloud-storage watcher) → doc.cheap: Scan Document with Input Binary Field set to the field holding the image → a node that writes the simplified fields into a spreadsheet, a database row or a CRM record.

An API error stops the workflow with the API's own message and a link to the matching page of the documentation. Turn on Continue On Fail to receive the error as an item instead.