Hmm, I've been sending receipts straight into Gemini 3 Flash and it handles them just fine. No need for this whole pipeline and definitely MUCH cheaper. Am I missing something?
25 Years of Eggs
71–80 of 86 posts
Re: 25 Years of Eggs
#72Absolutely loved the article, the process, and the results. Hated the price. You could pay a human to read receipts, 1 every 30 seconds (that’s slow!), $15/hr (twice the US federal minimum wage!), plus tax and overhead ($15x1.35) comes out to $20.25/hr over 5 hours. $101 all in. Sure, sure, a human solution doesn’t scale. But this sort of project makes me feel like we haven’t hit the industrialization moment that i t…
From some minor historical experience with Mechanical Turk, I bet you could get humans to do this for one or two cents per receipt. You do them all three times for error checking for $0.03-$0.06 per receipt. I used to pay a nickel for much, much more than 5x this amount of transcription per job, and I got the feeling that I was overpaying based on how eagerly I got responses in and that I saw a lot of the same worker…
I wasn't ready for Artificial Artificial Artificial Intelligence.
Re: 25 Years of Eggs
#73I don't know why people mess with tesseract in 2026, attention-based OCRs (and more recently VLMs) outperformed any LSTM-based approach since at least 2020. My guess is that it's the entry-point to OCR and the internet is flooded by that, just like pandas for data processing.
yup, deepseek-ocr-2 will have crushed this. then there's glm-ocr, dots-ocr, etc, paddle-ocr-vl, etc
tons of options ...
Re: 25 Years of Eggs
#74I don't know why people mess with tesseract in 2026, attention-based OCRs (and more recently VLMs) outperformed any LSTM-based approach since at least 2020. My guess is that it's the entry-point to OCR and the internet is flooded by that, just like pandas for data processing.
I was surprised to learn (from this article) that there are local models that can do this (not sure if there are any that run on hardware I actually have though, unlike Tesseract which works fine on the scanning hardware I set up for it ~5 years ago.) For privacy reasons, cloud-based OCR is a non-starter...
surprisingly, the ocr models don't need much vram, they are often about 2b, so most 6gb GPU will handle it fine.
Re: 25 Years of Eggs
#75Apart from the comical cost of extracting this data from paper receipts, is it more likely that stores will publish their product costs over time so trends can be observed or be more like gas stations where no prices are listed. I have no idea why a box of Cheerios costs $7 for processed oats but i see millions of reasons to obscure that data.
Stores will never publish anything like that. Why would they give consumers more informatian.
Re: 25 Years of Eggs
#76Expensive eggs are a political choice. Canada has eggs [1]. Mexico, too [2]. Meanwhile we have Tyson notching record profits [3] while facing zero antitrust scrutiny.
[1] https://www.npr.org/2025/03/18/nx-s1-5330454/egg-shortages-r...
[2] https://www.globalproductprices.com/rankings/egg_prices/
[3] https://farmaction.us/farm-action-calls-for-an-investigation...
Re: 25 Years of Eggs
#77A bit of a shill comment but… I have chickens and have been tracking egg production in an app that I’ve built, a livestock manager of sorts called Manger.
Looking at my data, since we’ve had our first egg 743 days ago, our hens have produced 9,393 eggs, or an average of just above a dozen a day.
The app can also count chickens, since each chicken has a UHF RFID.
Re: 25 Years of Eggs
#7810 years ago I wrote a reconciliation tool in VBA in Excel. I scan I all the (mostly thermal-printed) receipts and it matches them to credit card charges. I always envisioned incorporating OCR to automatically extract the totals, but the libraries were never good enough for my taste (and I've used industry-leading ones in work settings that process millions of reads a day).
So instead, I made a very simple UI where you just key in the amount (literally 5 keystrokes on average per image) and it finds the matching charge (or hit enter to instantly cycle through all matches). I've done bookeeping/taxes that way for a decade and keying has never been the bottleneck.
Recently I realized Amazon accounts for around a third of my credit card charges, by volume (yikes!). Unfortunately their transactions are more difficult to reconcile as portions of orders are charged piecemeal as they ship. Further, their webpage that is supposed to list your credit card charges with the matching order numbers is broken (lots of data missing - have reproduced and filed a bug report with their exec team which is still being worked on a month later).
So I wrote another tool. You download your order data and invoices via a personal data request, and it goes out and reconciles all of them. I wind up with a nice spreadsheet i can scroll around in, and whenever the cursor hits a row with an Amazon charge all the paperwork along with a generated order summary (granular down to the shipments and items) comes up on the screen to the right.
Pretty slick. And took less time to code up than his vibecoded project (but hats off to him anyway, sounds like a nice little project to hone your AI skills on). Sometimes these simple little bespoke tools are a far superior "productivity force multiplier" than fancy, generic commercial equivalents.
Re: 25 Years of Eggs
#79[dead]
Re: 25 Years of Eggs
#80Absolutely loved the article, the process, and the results. Hated the price. You could pay a human to read receipts, 1 every 30 seconds (that’s slow!), $15/hr (twice the US federal minimum wage!), plus tax and overhead ($15x1.35) comes out to $20.25/hr over 5 hours. $101 all in. Sure, sure, a human solution doesn’t scale. But this sort of project makes me feel like we haven’t hit the industrialization moment that i t…
Total receipts were over 11,000 so more like 100 hours or around $2000 so a similar price to the LLM.