Building a Local Receipt Extractor with Open-Source AI (Side Hustle)

A developer built a privacy-first local receipt and invoice extractor that uses Tesseract OCR to read uploaded receipt images and a locally hosted Llama 3 model via Ollama to parse vendor name, date, total, and tax into structured data, with a Streamlit interface. The tool is aimed at freelancers and small businesses that want to avoid sending sensitive client bills to cloud services. A small boutique owner who tested it said they would pay ₹200/month for a secure tool that sorts bills without uploading them to the cloud.

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle. I built a Local Receipt & Invoice Extractor. It is a privacy-first tool for freelancers and small business owners. You upload a receipt image, and it extracts the Vendor Name, Date, Total Amount, and Tax Amount. The biggest problem it solves is data privacy—freelancers don't want to upload sensitive client bills to cloud servers like Google or OpenAI. · UI: Streamlit Python · OCR Image to Text : Tesseract OCR · AI Parsing: Ollama running the Llama 3 model locally. The app reads the image using Tesseract, passes the raw text to the local Llama 3 model, and extracts structured data. This is where open-source shines: I tested this with a friend who runs a small boutique. They currently keep their bills in a shoebox. They said they would absolutely pay ₹200/month for a simple tool that sorts their bills securely without uploading them to the cloud.