Expensify is $5–$9 per user every month, forever, and your receipts live on their servers. Snapreceipt reads receipts with OCR that runs entirely on your machine, prefills the vendor, date, total and tax, and lets you review before anything saves. $19, once. No image or text ever leaves your machine.
If you've searched for a Expensify alternative, Snapreceipt is the pay-once option worth putting at the top of the list: Snapreceipt is $19, one time, and covers the same core job Expensify charges $5–$9/user/mo for.
What makes Snapreceipt the pick for 2026
- Import anything — Drag and drop images, use the file picker, or point a watched folder at your phone-sync directory. JPEG, PNG, WebP, AVIF and iPhone HEIC — even mislabeled files — with EXIF auto-rotation.
- Multi-pass local OCR — tesseract.js scans every receipt three ways, entirely on-disk, and votes per field: vendor/merchant, date, total, tax, subtotal, line items and bank or card network — an editable prefill you review before saving.
- Categories + project tags — A bundled category list plus your own, with free-form project and client tags for billable-expense tracking.
- Reports — Spend by category and by month, filterable, with Subtotal, Tax and Total columns and all math in exact integer cents.
- Exports — RFC 4180 CSV for your accountant and a PDF expense report with receipt thumbnails embedded.
Snapreceipt vs Expensify, at a glance
| Snapreceipt | Expensify | |
|---|---|---|
| Price | $19 once | $5–$9/user/mo |
| Cost after 3 years | $19 | $180–$324 per user |
| Receipt OCR | Yes — 100% local | Yes — cloud |
| Works offline | Yes | No |
| Your data | SQLite file you own | Their cloud |
| Mileage log | Yes | Yes — paid tiers |
| PDF report with receipt images | Yes | Yes |
At Expensify's $5–9 per user per month, one person spends $15–27 in a single quarter — more than Snapreceipt costs once, for life.
Common questions
Is it really free on GitHub?
Yes — Snapreceipt is MIT-licensed at github.com/bensblueprints/receipt-scanner-expense-mvp. The $19 buys the 1-click Windows installer; building from source is free.
Do my receipt images get uploaded?
Not by default. OCR is 100% local and nothing auto-saves. Two optional exceptions you control: a one-time ~11 MB OCR language-data download at install, and the optional cloud OCR button (ChatGPT plan or your own OpenAI/Doubao key) which sends that one image only when you click it.
Can it read handwritten invoices?
Local OCR reads print, not handwriting — a hard limit of any on-device engine. For handwriting, connect your ChatGPT account (Plus/Pro) or an OpenAI/Doubao API key and use the cloud button on that scan.
The bottom line
Snapreceipt won't out-feature Expensify on every axis — no subscription tool with a bigger team and a bigger roadmap loses on everything. But for the core job, $19 once against $5–$9/user/mo forever is a trade most people should at least look at. Snapreceipt is part of OneTimeSuite, a catalog of pay-once apps that replace subscription SaaS.
Try Snapreceipt — $19, once
Local receipt scanner and expense tracker: on-device OCR, categories, mileage, CSV and PDF exports.