The end of typing in receipts by hand

I've had a shoebox of receipts on my desk for two months. Café bills, hardware store, restaurant, one of my kid's school things. I keep meaning to enter them into a spreadsheet the way an organized person would. I keep not doing it.

Tonight I finally handed one to an AI agent — a photo of a café receipt, four line items, subtotal, tax, total — and asked for it back as structured JSON.

Eight seconds later, this was in my terminal:

{
  "vendor_name": "OCEAN BREEZE CAFE",
  "date": "2026-08-08",
  "order_number": "4721",
  "line_items": [
    {"item": "Cappuccino", "price": 4.50},
    {"item": "Almond Croissant", "price": 3.75},
    {"item": "Turkey Panini", "price": 8.25},
    {"item": "Sparkling Water", "price": 2.50}
  ],
  "subtotal": 19.00,
  "tax": 1.33,
  "total": 20.33
}

Vendor, date, every line item with its price, subtotal, tax, total. Ready to paste into a spreadsheet, feed to accounting software, whatever comes next.

Cost: $0.002. A fifth of a penny.

That number is possible because Reality Router picked the right model — a capable-but-cheap vision model — instead of routing the request to whatever flagship my agent would have defaulted to. More on that in a minute.

Let that math land

• One receipt: $0.002
• Twenty receipts (a month of your dining-out spending): $0.04
• A shoebox of two hundred receipts (a whole year, small business, freelancer): $0.40
• A thousand receipts (accountant with several small clients): $2.00

Two dollars to convert a thousand paper receipts into clean structured data. At those numbers, you stop budgeting for it and start doing it.

Who this actually helps

People at home who want to track expenses honestly for tax season, budgeting, or just to see where the money goes. It's the workflow you always meant to have.

Freelancers and small business owners who need line items for expense reports, invoicing, or their accountant's quarterly ask. Currently a Sunday afternoon of hand-typing; now it's ten minutes of pointing an agent at a folder of photos.

Accountants and bookkeepers with actual receipt volume. Client sends you a phone-photo dump of the quarter's expenses? Batch process the entire thing on the coffee break between meetings.

Anyone who has ever put off doing their expenses because the friction was too high for the reward.

The router is why this works

The reason it costs a fifth of a penny per receipt, and not a nickel or a dime, is that Reality Router made the model choice for me. A capable vision model looked at the image, extracted the fields, replied with clean JSON, and stopped. No premium tier premium.

If I'd hardcoded my agent to a flagship model — Claude Opus 5, or GPT-5, whatever your existing tool defaults to — the same eight-second call would have cost 15 to 40× more. Not dramatic on one receipt. Very dramatic when you're doing five hundred a month.

Reality Router picks the right model per request. You point it at your existing API keys. Your existing agent tool (OpenCode, Aider, Cursor, your own script) points at Reality Router instead of the model provider directly. Same code, one endpoint change, immediate right-sizing on every call.

Try it yourself

Reality Router is open source. Free-tier API keys work fine for this. Docker one-line install.

→ realityrouter.dev

Point OpenCode (or the framework of your choice) at it, snap a photo of a receipt on your desk, and let the agent give it back to you as JSON. Then multiply by however many receipts you've been avoiding.