Show HN: I Built a Receipt-Image to JSON Converter (+ Line-Items) (line-items.com)

28 points by BrandiATMuhkuh ↗ HN
Hi HN, I'm proud to show you that I've finally managed to create a Receipt-Image to JSON converter, including line-items!

Over the past 10 years, I have periodically tried (every ~3 years or so) to convert Receipt-Images to JSON. What particularly interested me were the line-items. It began with a Bachelor's project where we wanted to track prices by extracting product prices from line items. However, it was not feasible to ask users to type them all into our platform. I quickly realized this process was way too tedious. Only when taking a picture is all that is required, would such a platform work.

https://www.line-items.com is the standalone product that simply converts receipts to JSON. It's great for accountants but also for anyone building expense tracking tools.

If you want to talk to me personally, send me an email. You can find it on my profile.

Past Attempts:

- 2015: OpenCV + Bounding Boxes

- 2017: Azure Cognitive Services

- 2021: Amazon Textract

11 comments

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Pretty cool - have you thought of open-sourcing the project while keeping the SASS portion paid?
Thank you very much!

No, I have not thought about open sourcing it yet.

I was always a fan of the idea of building a micro - SAAS (Do one thing and that well!) and thought this could be a great candidate.

I only launched it today. Let's see what will happen next :D

This looks brilliant. What’s the use case you have in mind?

I know some accounting software have this feature.

I think adding more examples from different stores would be solid.

Good luck!

Thank you!

The main use cases are accounting software and expense trackers.

I know someone who is since years in the receipt to account-software business. But they hand craft receipt templates for each customer. Which is a slow and not very robust approach

https://line-items.com on the other hand "understand" the receipt and therefor can deal with any receipt.

Thanks for your suggesting regarding more examples. I'll add more soon. I had them in it already, but visually I didn't get it right :/ I'll try it again :)

Would you be willing to add email-based sign-up? Some users, especially in Europe, may prefer it to using Google or GitHub accounts to log in.
Thank you for your suggestion. I have just added e-mail login via magic link!
Great idea and love the site.

My hunch is that the price point is out somewhere between X5-x10 (too high)

But I wish you all the very best with it.

Thanks for you kinds words!

Yes I know the price point is a bit high. There are a couple of optimization's I will do to improve on that.

This should then also improve the speed quite a bit.

Great product. What technology are you currently using? I'm searching a technology to solve the machine readability for PDF documents with a lot of technical tables with weird colspans and rowspans.
I think a lot of people might end up just doing this with GPT-4V