2026-06-18
By Vadym · Generated with Boba, curated by me
I didn't build Snapstub because the receipt-scanner market was empty. It isn't. There are a dozen apps in this category, some with years of revenue and millions of users.
I built it because every app I looked at had the same problem: they hold your data hostage.
When you scan a receipt into most apps, your records live inside their app's private storage. You can see them in the UI. You can't easily get them out — not without paying, not without an export flow that costs $12.99/month, sometimes not at all.
The Smart Receipts v5 update is the most vivid case. Users who'd been trusting the app with years of expense history found their data locked behind a new subscription paywall after an "upgrade." Some lost records entirely. The App Store reviews are still raw about it.
Genius Scan killed its one-time purchase tier. Expensify starts at $5/month and goes up from there.
The pattern is the same: start with a reasonable tool, accumulate users who trust you with their records, then use that lock-in to extract a subscription.
I find this genuinely distasteful. Receipts are financial records. They matter at tax time. Losing access to them — or paying indefinitely to keep access — is a real problem for freelancers, contractors, and anyone who deducts expenses.
One thing, well.
You point your camera at a receipt — paper, on-screen, a photo in your camera roll. Apple's on-device Vision framework reads it and extracts merchant · date · total · tax · category into a clean row. You confirm any fields it flagged as uncertain (it tells you when it wasn't sure, instead of guessing silently). The row is filed.
Every receipt and every export lives in your Files app — readable without Snapstub, readable if Snapstub stops existing tomorrow, readable in any spreadsheet app forever. When tax time comes, two taps exports everything to CSV or a printable PDF report.
No account. No cloud. Nothing leaves your phone. $9.99 once.
I want to be specific about this because "on-device" is marketing language that gets abused.
Snapstub uses VNRecognizeTextRequest — Apple's Vision framework — to read the receipt. The recognition happens on your phone, in seconds, before the result ever touches my server (there isn't one). I don't have an API key bill. I don't see your receipts. There's no backend to breach.
The reason this is possible now is that Apple's on-device OCR has gotten good enough to extract structured fields from receipts reliably. It wasn't always. The technology caught up to the use case.
One design decision I'm genuinely proud of: Snapstub tells you when it wasn't sure about a field.
Most receipt apps silently fill in what they extracted, whether or not it's right. You discover the error later — at tax time, when it matters most. Snapstub flags uncertain fields in amber and asks you to confirm before filing. If the merchant name is ambiguous, you see the flag. If the total came from a subtotal line instead of the total line, you see it.
This sounds like a minor UX detail. It's actually the difference between "I trust this ledger" and "I have to verify everything anyway."
Freelancers, sole proprietors, contractors, rideshare drivers, anyone who reimburses expenses, and anyone who ends up with a shoebox of receipts in March wondering how to turn them into something their accountant can use.
It's not for people who want full bookkeeping (that's QuickBooks). It's not a budgeting app. It's a focused extractor: snap it, get a clean row, own it forever, export when you need to.
The pricing is a product decision, not just a business one.
The whole promise of Snapstub is that your data is yours and you're never held hostage. A subscription creates exactly the kind of leverage I'm criticizing in other apps. If you stop paying, what happens to your records?
With a one-time purchase, the answer is clear: nothing. The app still works. Your data is still in your Files app. You paid once and that's it.
The math also works. At $9.99 once versus a $1.99/month competitor, Snapstub is cheaper after five months and stays cheaper forever. For a tool you use at tax time every year, that matters.
Snapstub is live on the App Store now. I'm launching on Product Hunt on Wednesday, June 24.
If you're a freelancer, contractor, or sole proprietor who dreads the receipt pile — it's $9.99 and takes about 30 seconds per receipt.
Vadym Suprun is an iOS developer building privacy-first apps. Snapstub is available on the App Store.