SnapReceipt: turning a Cyrillic receipt into a structured expense

Expense tracking fails at the same point for everyone: data entry. The app asks you to type in every purchase, you do it for four days, and you stop.

SnapReceipt started from the idea that the photo of the receipt already contains everything needed. It only has to be read.

Why Bulgarian receipts are a hard case

Reading a receipt sounds like a solved problem until the receipt is in Cyrillic. Bulgarian receipts abbreviate product names aggressively and inconsistently, often to the point where a human has to stop and work out what they bought.

So this is not classic OCR turning pixels into text. We use Google Gemini to get to the meaning: not just what string is printed on the line, but what product it is and which expense category it belongs to. The difference is between “ЛУК ЖЪЛТ 1КГ” as text and “vegetables, 2.40 lv.” as a record you can add up.

The household is the unit, not the user

Personal finance is rarely personal. A household budget gets spent by several people, often at the same time and in different shops.

So family accounts share a budget and a shopping list in real time: two people in two different shops see the same state. That changes the data model at its foundations, and it is one of those decisions that is nearly impossible to add later if you started with a single user.

The same data underpins the real price comparison across shops and the recipe suggestions that start from what you actually bought.

A PWA, not an app store

SnapReceipt runs in the browser and installs to the phone straight from there, with no App Store and no Google Play.

The reason is the barrier to entry. A household budgeting app spreads by word of mouth, and every step between “I heard about this” and “I am using it” filters people out. A link that opens immediately clears that barrier more easily than an install from a store.

The trade-off is real: you lose store visibility and some of the system integrations. For this product it was worth it.

Status

The product is live at snapreceipt.net. Payment integration is still in development and a separate price-tracking section is on the roadmap. We say so explicitly, because the gap between shipped and planned is exactly what usually gets papered over.