Why i built Expense Lens — a founder's story

It was 11 PM on a Tuesday. I'd just finished dinner at a client meeting in Zurich, a CHF 47 meal I needed to expense. I pulled out my phone, opened my expense tracking app, snapped the receipt, and… nothing. The app crashed. Again.

I reopened it. Tried again. This time it uploaded, but the receipt just sat there in the processing queue. "Processing…" it said, like it had said for the past three days about six other receipts that were still stuck.

So I did what I'd done dozens of times before: I opened a support ticket asking them to manually unstick my images so they could be processed. Then I waited.

This wasn't a one-time thing. This was every week.

The breaking point

I'd been using what was supposedly one of the "best" expense tracking apps on the market. For years, actually. And for years, I watched it slowly decay.

The developers had stopped updating it. The UI looked like it was designed in 2015 and never touched again. The mobile app—which I needed because that's when you capture receipts, in the moment, at the restaurant, at the gas station—crashed constantly. It was genuinely unreliable.

But the real problem was the scanning. It was terrible.

Automatic receipt scanning was the whole point of using the app. Snap a photo, let it extract the merchant, date, and amount. Simple, right? Except it rarely worked correctly. I'd get receipts back with wrong amounts, garbled merchant names, or missing dates entirely. I was spending more time fixing the auto-extracted data than I would have spent just typing it manually.

And the stuck queues? Receipts would upload and then just… sit there. Not processed. Not errored. Just stuck in limbo. Sometimes for days. I'd have to contact support, again, to get them manually pushed through. It was absurd.

No spending analytics. No automatic descriptions. And as someone who's lived on four continents, the currency support was a joke. Limited options, poor exchange rate handling. Every multi-currency expense became a manual calculation exercise.

I kept waiting for updates that never came. For fixes that never shipped. For improvements that were clearly never on anyone's roadmap.

The realization

One night, staring at another crashed app and another support ticket, I thought: Why doesn't expense tracking just work the way it should?

I'm not a traditional software developer. I'm a linguist by training—computational linguistics, specifically. I've spent my career working with language, data, and the intersection of the two. Python, R, pattern analysis. But I understand how modern AI has transformed what's possible with text extraction and categorization. I know that receipt scanning has gotten dramatically better in recent years. I know that mobile apps don't have to crash. And I know that processing queues shouldn't get stuck if you architect them properly.

I've lived outside my home country of Canada since 2012 and I'm based in Switzerland now. I've collected receipts in pounds, lira, dollars, francs, and euros, often in the same month. I'm exactly the kind of user that existing expense apps weren't built for.

I set out to build what I couldn't find anywhere else.

What Expense Lens does differently

The core idea behind Expense Lens is simple: it should be automatic.

Not "automatic with asterisks." Not "automatic but you'll still spend 20 minutes a week fixing things." Actually automatic. The kind of automatic where, after your first month of using it, your expense report could land in your inbox fully assembled—without you lifting a finger.

In practice:

AI extraction that actually works. Expense Lens uses modern AI—not legacy OCR—to read your receipts. Merchant names, amounts, dates, currencies—extracted accurately from a photo. No stuck queues. No waiting days for processing. No contacting support to manually unstick images.

Smart categorization that learns from you. Scan a coffee receipt three times and categorize it as "Food & Dining"? Expense Lens remembers. The AI builds a model of your spending patterns and your categories, so it gets better the more you use it. By month two, most of your expenses categorize themselves.

Email-in receipts. Every user gets a unique email address. Forward any receipt or invoice to it, and Expense Lens automatically processes and categorizes it. No app needed.

Multi-currency by design. 170+ currencies with real-time conversion rates. Scan a receipt in Thai baht, and it converts to your home currency automatically. Built by someone who actually juggles currencies every month—not as an afterthought, but as a core feature.

Organize by project. Separate personal expenses from freelance work from client projects. Tag by trip, by client, by whatever makes sense for your life.

Simple pricing. Starter at $4.99/month for 30 scans. Value at $9.99/month for 75 scans. Pro at $19.99/month for 200 scans. No enterprise sales calls. No hidden fees.

The vision: hands-Off Expense tracking

The goal: expense tracking that requires almost zero effort.

You scan receipts as you get them—a 3-second task. The AI extracts and categorizes everything. At the end of the month, you get a link in your email to a complete, organized expense report. Ready to send to your accountant, your client, or just to review yourself.

No spreadsheets. No manual data entry. No Sunday afternoon "catching up on expenses." It just happens.

We're not there on every feature yet—Expense Lens is still growing and improving. But the foundation is built, and every update moves closer to that vision.

Who this is for

I built Expense Lens for people like me:

Freelancers and solo-preneurs who need to track expenses for tax time without the overhead of enterprise software that assumes you have an accounting department.

Expats and international workers who deal with multiple currencies, cross-border transactions, and the headache of exchange rates. Digital nomads who expense things in euros one day and francs the next.

Smart budgeters who want simple, effective tracking without the bloat. No features you'll never use. No complexity you don't need. Just expense tracking that works.

If you're looking for how Expense Lens compares to the competition, check out our complete guide to YNAB alternatives in 2026.

Try it

I'm not going to tell you Expense Lens is perfect. It's still growing, still improving.

But it doesn't crash. The AI actually works. Your receipts don't get stuck. And when I find something that needs fixing, I actually fix it—because I use this app every single day.

If you've ever stared at a crashed app or a stuck queue and thought "there has to be something better"—this is that something.

Get Started Free at expense-lens.com/join →