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Comment by pabloiv | Hacker News Reader

Hi HN, I'm part of the team here at receiptloader. if you have any questions, please ask anything you'd like.

App is nice, but pricing is out of control.

Change all instances of "/ month" to "/ year" and you've got a customer. Or better yet, just charge 0.01$/scan in $1 increments, or $5 increments.

Your top plan costs as much as my internet!

I could scan a thousand receipts to my FREE gmail or dropbox, for, um, free; so you can't sell the data storage element.

Sweet project, been thinking of doing the same thing myself.

I guess since most don't care about privacy this is a niche question. But I'd like the option of processing the images myself. If the phone is to weak for it send it directly to my PC (or sync when I get home) and keep everything there.

Although the potential for this is huge I just will not use it if it is stored/processed in the 'cloud'.

Is it possible to extract the names of individual items as well? I keep a food diary and it would be amazingly helpful if I could have an automatically compiled list of foods in my fridge (by scanning my grocery receipts).

I would switch to an iPhone for that.

There's lots of people out there that simply don't use cash anymore. Does this service have anything to offer people like me that mint doesn't already offer? I see the use if you make most of your purchases in cash...just not otherwise.

Besides extracting the data from the recipt we also keep the image. From beta testers this has been useful for expense reports which require evidence, as well as for returning items at stores. Of course returns depend on the original vendor, but we've had beta testers return stuff at grocery stores, brick and mortar tech stores, and such.

Ultimately this is useful for submitting tax returns come April.

I dunno about you, but while my credit card company does itemize my transactions, they don't provide any sort of reporting tool to track how I spent my money. (They do provide a CSV export, which is suddenly looking like something I should try to analyze.)

Mint does a pretty good job in analysis. It categorizes anything I spend at Schnucks for example as "Groceries" and allows you to track how much you've spent this month compared to previous months and such. It only fails in purchases from places like Wal-Mart, where what you purchase can vary wildly.

Well, it offers a lot to people outside the states for whom nothing like mint is available.

Nice work, it's an great app for people like me. Juz curious, how this technology works?. thnx

The core service behind this is the Amazon Mechanical Turk. We've been working with amazon for years (on this and other projects) and they've helped us create a solution that keeps the user anonymous and helps return quick results.

well done!! keep it up, it has a great scope.

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