Looking at a Streamline alternative? Per-page vs. subscription pricing for PDF remediation

If you're evaluating Streamline — or you're a
Streamline customer weighing options for document accessibility — the useful
comparison isn't "who's better." It's structural: how each service prices
the work. Streamline's listed PDF remediation is per-page ($7 a page, 5-day
turnaround); Ketchly is a flat monthly subscription with documents included.
Which model fits you depends almost entirely on your publishing volume, and
this post walks the honest math both directions.

Everything here about Streamline was verified against
getstreamline.com in July 2026;
check their site for current details, and tell us if something's out of
date.

What Streamline actually sells — credit where due

Streamline effectively built the special-district web market: a website
platform designed for water, fire, community-services, and library
districts, with compliance tracking, board-meeting tooling, and accessible
site templates. Their monthly platform plans run from $120 to $2,000
depending on features, with one-time setup packages on top. If your district
needs a whole new website with compliance baked in, they're a serious,
proven option — that's not something we compete with, and pretending
otherwise would be silly.

Document remediation is where the models diverge. As of July 2026,
Streamline's pricing page lists PDF remediation at $7 per page with a
5-day turnaround. They've also introduced DocAccess, a
subscription-based document service (OCR, AI processing, human review of
complex pages, WCAG 2.1 AA output) priced — in their words — at "pennies per
page," with page limits by plan and specific pricing available by quote.

The per-page math, worked honestly

Per-page pricing is easy to reason about for one document and hard to
budget for a publishing habit. Note the unit: it's per page, not per
document.

• A 4-page meeting agenda: $28. Fine.
• A 40-page board packet: $280 — for one meeting.
• A board that meets monthly: roughly $3,400 a year in packets alone,
  before minutes, budgets, newsletters, or the
  decades of scanned documents
  most districts have piled up.
• A 300-page budget document or audit: $2,100. Once.

The deeper cost is behavioral. When every page has a price, someone has to
decide, document by document, whether accessibility is "worth it" — and the
predictable result is that agendas get remediated while the local-history
scans and old minutes quietly don't. With the
April 2028 deadline
covering your existing posted documents, not just new ones, that
triage habit is exactly the wrong muscle to build.

The turnaround matters too: at a listed 5-day turnaround, remediation
becomes a step you schedule around — finish the packet a week early or
post it inaccessible and fix it later.

What a flat subscription changes

Ketchly's model is a flat monthly rate with documents included —
currently $49 to $199 a month depending on volume, with the typical district
plan at $99 for 150 PDFs a month (a whole PDF, not a page), and remediation
measured in minutes, not days. Two things follow from the structure, not
from any claim about quality:

1. The marginal document costs nothing. Nobody has to decide whether the
   1962 board minutes deserve $175 of remediation. Upload everything; the
   subscription doesn't care.
2. The line item is knowable in January. District budgets are annual and
   approved in public. "$1,188 a year" survives a board meeting;
   "$7 a page times however many pages we end up publishing" is a range, and
   ranges get cut.

And because it's minutes rather than days, remediation stops being a
scheduling constraint: finish the packet, upload it, post it accessible the
same afternoon.

When per-page — or Streamline — genuinely makes sense

An honest comparison names the cases where the other model wins:

• Tiny, irregular volume. If your district publishes a handful of short
  documents a year, per-page beats any subscription on raw cost. $28 four
  times a year is $112; no monthly plan touches that.
• You want the whole platform. If the real project is replacing your
  website — templates, hosting, compliance dashboard, payments — Streamline
  is selling something Ketchly simply doesn't. We remediate documents and
  work with whatever website you already have.
• You're already on Streamline and DocAccess bundles into your plan. If
  the subscription you're paying for now covers your document volume at a
  price you can see, switching costs attention you may not need to spend.
  Ask them for the specific number; then compare.

The bottom line

Price the year, not the document. Count what you actually publish — packets,
minutes, budgets, newsletters — plus the backlog the
2028 deadline puts in
scope, multiply by the per-page rate, and put that next to a flat
subscription. For a district with a real publishing schedule, the math
usually isn't close; for a district that publishes almost nothing, it
honestly favors per-page. Either way you'll have a number your board can
vote on — and if the flat-rate side of that comparison looks right for your
district, that's exactly what our pricing is built to be.