ClearBill

drop the bill
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Inspiration

we're all broke and our parents are always complaining about their bills. like, nobody actually reads them. you just see the total and pay it. bills have all these random charges and fees and you dont know what half of them are. so we built something to actually make sense of them instead of just guessing whats going on.

What it does

you upload a bill (pdf, image, whatever) and clearbill breaks it down for you. it extracts all the charges, uses ai to explain what theyre actually for, tells you which ones might be scams or mistakes, and shows you a dashboard with charts and stuff. you can also compare bills from different months to see where your money is actually going.

How we built it

next.js with typescript so we could build it fast and not have weird bugs. we used groq api for the ai explanations so its actually fast and cheap. the parsing uses tesseract for ocr and pdfjs for pdfs. tailwind and shadcn for the ui because we didnt want to spend forever on styling. recharts for the graphs. all the logic is separated so the ai only looks at structured data, not raw text.

Challenges we ran into

ocr is hard lol. bills are formatted completely differently depending on who makes them. we had to write a lot of heuristics to normalize everything into the same structure. also making sure the ai doesnt just make stuff up was tricky. we had to constraint it to only explain charges we actually found.

Accomplishments that we're proud of

the parsing pipeline actually works on real bills without destroying your data. the dashboard looks actually good and not janky. the fee detection catches real patterns like duplicate charges and random admin fees. constraining the ai to never invent charges is solid because hallucinations suck.

What we learned

bill formats are insane and every company does it differently. ai is really good at explaining things once you give it clean data but terrible if you give it messy text. typescript catches so many bugs before they happen. motion design actually makes apps feel less janky.

What's next for ClearBill

recurring bill tracking so you can see all your subscriptions. connecting to actual bank data so we can match real transactions to bills. machine learning for fee detection instead of just rules. maybe a browser extension so you can upload bills straight from your email. bills api integration so people can auto-upload.