I am so surprised that an OCR SDK costs so high like $15K. (See Christian's answer)
I suggest you try other commercial engines such as
Nuance or
ExperVision, which is much cheaper and with high accuracy for business.
If you just want to play OCR for some homework or research, you can try many open source (Tesseract) or free OCR.
If you don't want to OCR common documents but OCR special objects, you can look for an OCR vendors and let them customize an engine for you.