Absolutely 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 thought we had quite yet.
One issue is that the human was less accurate than the LLM. The other is that the author probably didn't pay $1,500 for this, they probably paid $20 on a subscription.
I think at a certain scale we're talking about switching to local trained models which don't have the same operating costs as running a frontier model for OCR. That would reduce the ongoing costs significantly. Might take longer than 30 seconds to read each receipt if you run multiple passes to ensure accuracy, but could run 24/7/365 without the same tax and administration overhead of humans.
Spherical cows aside though, I do agree with you that I should not consider scalability as a given.
I suppose if we had access to a public data set like this receipt bank, programmers could time themselves setting up a solution with off the shelf OCR algos. If they could clock in at under 10 hours they could advertise themselves as being "just as good as an LLM, but significantly cheaper." Downside for the managerial class that wants generative algos for the complete lack of legal protections.
>Everyone needs a rewarding hobby. I’ve been scanning all of my receipts since 2001. I never typed in a single price - just kept the images. I figured someday the technology to read them would catch up, and the data would be interesting.
This is perhaps among the best openers I've ever read.
I usually avoid shallow comments but I feel like this time it has to be said as a conversation starter: That's a lot of eggs!
Also ignoring the benefits of subscriptions, an estimate in the magnitude of thousands of dollars for extracting egg prices still makes me feel like we aren't "there" yet. This should have been a problem with a much more efficient solution given the advancements in the AI, data analysis and OCR space. I am sort of disillusioned.
I actually was going to go for the "why did the chicken not cross the road?". Then I wanted to say "because it was in a price negotiation with the author to sell its eggs", but it was too wordy. Then I thought, "because the author had it as an egg before it could hatch", but it was too dark... Then I gave up.
Well, I guess you cannot make a chicken joke without breaking some eggs (I'll stop now. I'm really sorry, but come on, it's Sunday).
Apart 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.
Great article through and through. The total number of places you've bought eggs at made me feel a tad depressed though: 4 places where you lived at or spent a longer time, 5 you traveled to *.
I tend to grow bored of a location after a year or two, though I'm certainly in the minority.
* Of course you didn't buy eggs every time you traveled somewhere, so probably not the entire truth.
I haven't tried it with receipts, but I've gotten excellent OCR results with Gemini 3.0 and now 3.1 on some challenging texts: handwritten letters I couldn't fully decipher myself, vertically printed Japanese texts with tiny furigana readings next to the kanji, a 19th century book in English with extensive use of italics and small caps. Gemini is good at extracting text and formatting from complex layouts, and it might work with egg receipts, too.
Inflation adjusted dsta just comes to tell us that either eggs have been outdoing the CPI for 25 years or that actual CPI is way higher than what the BLS calculates.
It depends what dates you're looking at, but energy (gas prices and more) and food (including eggs) are generally recognized as way more volatile than the rest of the CPI.
Eggs were actually quite stable for the 20 years prior to 2001, so maybe don't put your life savings into egg futures...
That is very curious, yes. Eggs seem to just start to increase dramatically after 2000 and indeed outdo the CPI, disregarding the peaks and valleys of the different shocks to egg production like covid and the avian flu.
I read that the price includes free range, eco, etc varieties which are more expensive and in more demand nowadays, probably just that explains a good chunk of the price increase.
CPI tracks a weighted average of a large basket of different goods, of which eggs are only a small part. It would be extremely surprising if the change in egg prices over time closely matched CPI.
I think they worked that back from tokens used, hence the estimation, but their actual billing was Claude Code & Codex subscriptions. (Which probably was also the main contributor to it taking 14 days.)
Without 25 years of photographing receipts, weeks of agents coding and billions of token spent, I can predict that egg prices increased, and the graph of my egg consumption over time is concave, part because my income has risen, part because while all prices get inflated, eggs are still cheaper than other sources of protein, and I did in less than 1 microsecond.
I will use them tokens to be able to afford more eggs.
Absolutely 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 thought we had quite yet.
AI has some weird unexpected uses that haven’t been fully uncovered yet, while it fails to scale or match the needed accuracy on expected usecases.
One issue is that the human was less accurate than the LLM. The other is that the author probably didn't pay $1,500 for this, they probably paid $20 on a subscription.
I mean, at over 1000% the cost, the machine solution doesn't scale either?
I think at a certain scale we're talking about switching to local trained models which don't have the same operating costs as running a frontier model for OCR. That would reduce the ongoing costs significantly. Might take longer than 30 seconds to read each receipt if you run multiple passes to ensure accuracy, but could run 24/7/365 without the same tax and administration overhead of humans.
Spherical cows aside though, I do agree with you that I should not consider scalability as a given.
I suppose if we had access to a public data set like this receipt bank, programmers could time themselves setting up a solution with off the shelf OCR algos. If they could clock in at under 10 hours they could advertise themselves as being "just as good as an LLM, but significantly cheaper." Downside for the managerial class that wants generative algos for the complete lack of legal protections.
>Everyone needs a rewarding hobby. I’ve been scanning all of my receipts since 2001. I never typed in a single price - just kept the images. I figured someday the technology to read them would catch up, and the data would be interesting.
This is perhaps among the best openers I've ever read.
I read a lot. This article, entirely.
I usually avoid shallow comments but I feel like this time it has to be said as a conversation starter: That's a lot of eggs!
Also ignoring the benefits of subscriptions, an estimate in the magnitude of thousands of dollars for extracting egg prices still makes me feel like we aren't "there" yet. This should have been a problem with a much more efficient solution given the advancements in the AI, data analysis and OCR space. I am sort of disillusioned.
> This should have been a problem with a much more efficient solution given the advancements in the AI, data analysis and OCR space.
There's got to be a "it's a chicken/egg problem" joke in there somewhere, but i'm not seeing it.
I actually was going to go for the "why did the chicken not cross the road?". Then I wanted to say "because it was in a price negotiation with the author to sell its eggs", but it was too wordy. Then I thought, "because the author had it as an egg before it could hatch", but it was too dark... Then I gave up.
Well, I guess you cannot make a chicken joke without breaking some eggs (I'll stop now. I'm really sorry, but come on, it's Sunday).
> (I'll stop now. I'm really sorry, but come on, it's Sunday).
FWIW, you made an eggceptional attempt :).
> That's a lot of eggs!
Less than one per day, assuming they're doing groceries only for themselves
Apart 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.
Great article through and through. The total number of places you've bought eggs at made me feel a tad depressed though: 4 places where you lived at or spent a longer time, 5 you traveled to *.
I tend to grow bored of a location after a year or two, though I'm certainly in the minority.
* Of course you didn't buy eggs every time you traveled somewhere, so probably not the entire truth.
I haven't tried it with receipts, but I've gotten excellent OCR results with Gemini 3.0 and now 3.1 on some challenging texts: handwritten letters I couldn't fully decipher myself, vertically printed Japanese texts with tiny furigana readings next to the kanji, a 19th century book in English with extensive use of italics and small caps. Gemini is good at extracting text and formatting from complex layouts, and it might work with egg receipts, too.
Inflation adjusted dsta just comes to tell us that either eggs have been outdoing the CPI for 25 years or that actual CPI is way higher than what the BLS calculates.
It depends what dates you're looking at, but energy (gas prices and more) and food (including eggs) are generally recognized as way more volatile than the rest of the CPI.
Eggs were actually quite stable for the 20 years prior to 2001, so maybe don't put your life savings into egg futures...
Egg prices: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/APU0000708111
CPI: https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPIAUCSL
Core CPI (without food + energy prices): https://fred.stlouisfed.org/series/CPILFESL
That is very curious, yes. Eggs seem to just start to increase dramatically after 2000 and indeed outdo the CPI, disregarding the peaks and valleys of the different shocks to egg production like covid and the avian flu.
I read that the price includes free range, eco, etc varieties which are more expensive and in more demand nowadays, probably just that explains a good chunk of the price increase.
CPI tracks a weighted average of a large basket of different goods, of which eggs are only a small part. It would be extremely surprising if the change in egg prices over time closely matched CPI.
> Estimated token cost $1,591
I can assume this person does in fact NOT need to worry about the price of eggs ?
I think they worked that back from tokens used, hence the estimation, but their actual billing was Claude Code & Codex subscriptions. (Which probably was also the main contributor to it taking 14 days.)
Without 25 years of photographing receipts, weeks of agents coding and billions of token spent, I can predict that egg prices increased, and the graph of my egg consumption over time is concave, part because my income has risen, part because while all prices get inflated, eggs are still cheaper than other sources of protein, and I did in less than 1 microsecond.
I will use them tokens to be able to afford more eggs.
There is a reason why reciept transcription is still the task with the highest demand on mechanical turk.
> Estimated token cost $1,591 > Confirmed egg receipts 589 > Total egg spend captured $1,972 > Total eggs 8,604
...
> I can’t wait to see what 30 years of eggs looks like.
At $2.70 per receipt, i'd be in no hurry to find out!