Quick answer
Yes — Snapreceipt is a one-time-purchase alternative to Expensify. It costs $19 once, while Expensify runs $5–$9/user/mo — about $60 per year, every year. Local receipt scanner and expense tracker: on-device OCR, categories, mileage, CSV and PDF exports. It is for people who want the job done on their own hardware without a renewal date — not for teams that live inside Expensify's ecosystem.
The verdict
Switch to Snapreceipt if you are an individual or small team paying Expensify $5–$9/user/mo for work your own machine can do. 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.
Stay with Expensify if your workflow depends on its integrations, you need enterprise features (SSO, admin controls, SLAs), or your team is large enough that per-seat collaboration tooling is worth the bill. Snapreceipt does not try to replicate those.
Head to head
| 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 |
| 5-year cost | $19 | $300 |
Where Expensify still wins
- Ecosystem and integrations. Established tools accumulate years of third-party integrations, templates and add-ons. If your workflow is wired into Expensify's ecosystem, switching means rebuilding that plumbing — a real cost.
- Team and enterprise features. Shared workspaces, granular permissions, SSO, audit logs and a vendor to call when something breaks — that is what the higher subscription tiers actually buy, and a pay-once app does not come with it.
- Familiarity and hiring. Expensify is the name people already know. Onboarding a team onto a tool nobody has used before takes time the subscription never charges for.
Where Snapreceipt wins
- Price, permanently. $19 once versus $60/yr for as long as you use it. There is no renewal, no seat count and no tier gate.
- Import anything. Drag and drop images, use the file picker, or point a watched folder at your phone-sync directory to land photos in a review inbox.
- Local OCR auto-extract. tesseract.js runs entirely on-disk to pull vendor, date, total and tax as 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.
The math
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.
- After 1 year: Snapreceipt has cost you $19 total — Expensify has cost $60.
- After 3 years: Snapreceipt is still $19 — the subscription is at $180.
- After 5 years: Snapreceipt is still $19 — the subscription is at $300.
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?
No. OCR is 100% local, nothing auto-saves, and the only network access is a one-time ~11 MB download of the English OCR language data during install. After that it's fully offline.
Does the OCR always get it right?
Not always, and we'd rather say so. Extraction is a prefill you review — a wrong guess is just something you fix in the form before you click Save.
Try Snapreceipt — $19, one time
Or get Snapreceipt plus every other app in the suite: the OneTimeSuite bundle is currently $97, one time.