The idea
A phone app where you photograph a receipt and it extracts the retailer, purchase date, item, and price using on-device OCR — no cloud upload required. For anything covered by a manufacturer or extended warranty, you tag the coverage length once and the app calculates the expiration date automatically. It then pushes a reminder a few weeks before that date, along with the original receipt image, model number, and any warranty registration link, so you actually have what you need to file a claim instead of digging through a shoebox.
Why build this
Warranties lapse silently. Nobody files receipts by expiration date, and by the time an appliance breaks two years in, the paper receipt has faded or been thrown out entirely. On-device OCR is now fast and accurate enough (Apple's Vision framework, Google's ML Kit, or a local model like PaddleOCR) that this doesn't need a backend at all — it's a genuinely private, one-time-setup tool rather than another subscription service asking for your purchase history. The pain is universal but small enough that nobody has built a good dedicated tool for it; existing "receipt scanner" apps are built for expense reporting and business tax categories, not consumer warranty tracking.
Stack sketch
- Expo / React Native for iOS and Android from one codebase
- On-device OCR: Apple Vision (iOS) and ML Kit Text Recognition (Android) via native modules, falling back to Tesseract.js for edge cases
- SQLite (via
expo-sqlite) for local storage — no server, no account required for v1 - Local push notifications (
expo-notifications) scheduled at capture time, no backend push infra needed - Optional: a simple regex/heuristic parser layer on top of raw OCR text to pull out date, vendor, and total, with a manual-edit screen since OCR will misparse plenty of receipts
Scope for v1
- Capture receipt photo, run OCR, let the user confirm/edit extracted fields (vendor, date, item, warranty length)
- Local list view sorted by expiration date, with a "expiring soon" filter
- Local push reminder N days before expiration (configurable default, e.g. 30 days)
- Store the original photo and any manually-attached PDF (registration confirmation, extended warranty doc)
- Out of scope for v1: multi-device sync, shared/family accounts, automatic email-receipt import, retailer API integrations, claim filing automation
Where it could go
The natural next step is optional cloud sync (iCloud/Google Drive-backed, still no custom backend) so a broken or lost phone doesn't wipe years of receipt history — that alone would justify a small one-time or annual price. After that, email inbox scanning (via a Gmail/Outlook read-only OAuth scope) could auto-import digital receipts without a photo step at all, which covers the growing share of purchases that never produce paper. A third direction is a lightweight "household inventory" view — total value of tracked items, a home-insurance-ready export — which turns the same data into something useful beyond just warranty dates.
Watch out for
OCR accuracy on thermal receipts (faded ink, tiny fonts) will be the biggest UX drag — budget real time for the manual-correction flow rather than assuming extraction will just work, and test against receipts from a wide range of retailers before shipping.