# Veryfi OCR API (and Emacs front-end for it) **URL:** \ **Category:** News\ **Created:** [June 21, 2025, 2:21pm UTC](https://forum.plaintextaccounting.org/t/veryfi-ocr-api-and-emacs-front-end-for-it/581 "2025-06-21T14:21:26Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 4\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![TRS-80](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex003/user_avatar/forum.plaintextaccounting.org/trs-80/32/92_2.png) [@TRS-80](https://forum.plaintextaccounting.org/u/TRS-80)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2025, 2:21pm UTC](https://forum.plaintextaccounting.org/t/veryfi-ocr-api-and-emacs-front-end-for-it/581/1 "2025-06-21T14:21:27Z")
I just sent this to the Beancount mailing list, but thought I would cross-post it here as well... Hello Friends, I am very pleased to announce that I have switched careers and should no longer have to travel all the time, so now I can get back to working on many projects I have wanted to since years now. πŸ™‚ One of those is dealing with the tedium of paper receipts in a more automated way. I have been looking for some kind of receipt OCR for years now. I even played with some of the F/LOSS OCR tools which are available, but even there it seems to me you have to tweak them to get good results I think. Or maybe I was just bad at it. πŸ˜ƒ Anyway at some point I realized the best way might just be to pay someone to figure out all those fiddly details. Now it turns out I didn't even need to pay any money after all! Anyway, I'm just trying to illustrate my thought process here. So finally I stumbled across this Veryfi API. I am sure there are others but so far I found this works very well and very accurately. I have been really happpy with it. You can get up to 100 API calls per month for free with a developer account (which I was able to obtain without any trouble). And that is enough for my personal needs. I thought others might find this interesting, so I wanted to share it with the list. I would encourage you to make a developer account (you can even get a 2 week free trial I think first) and just upload some recipts via their web interface, and see how accurate it is for you. I have no affiliation with them, just been looking for something like this for years. Now, I prefer to work in Emacs Lisp (rather than Python) so of course the next thing was writing a front-end to this API for Emacs. πŸ™‚ I realize less of you are probably interested in that, but I thought I would mention it anyway. It has been working flawless for me, I just need to write a README and publish it. Maybe if there was some interest it might motivate me to do so, sooner. πŸ˜‰ Cheers! ---
**Author:** ![simonmic](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex003/user_avatar/forum.plaintextaccounting.org/simonmic/32/1_2.png) [@simonmic](https://forum.plaintextaccounting.org/u/simonmic)\ **Post date:** [June 21, 2025, 2:48pm UTC](https://forum.plaintextaccounting.org/t/veryfi-ocr-api-and-emacs-front-end-for-it/581/2 "2025-06-21T14:48:59Z")
Congrats @TRS-80 ! ---
**Author:** ![TRS-80](https://yyz1.discourse-cdn.com/flex003/user_avatar/forum.plaintextaccounting.org/trs-80/32/92_2.png) [@TRS-80](https://forum.plaintextaccounting.org/u/TRS-80)\ **Post date:** [December 20, 2025, 7:23pm UTC](https://forum.plaintextaccounting.org/t/veryfi-ocr-api-and-emacs-front-end-for-it/581/3 "2025-12-20T19:23:00Z")
The intersection of Veryfi API and Emacs users must be very small indeed, as there does not seem to be any interest in this at all. πŸ˜„ That’s OK, I made it for myself and I use it probably 2-3 times per week, I could not keep up with my receipts without it. If there was any interest, I might be bothered to clean it up and publish. ---
**Author:** ![rdsteed](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/r/3be4f8/32.png) [@rdsteed](https://forum.plaintextaccounting.org/u/rdsteed)\ **Post date:** [January 6, 2026, 6:13pm UTC](https://forum.plaintextaccounting.org/t/veryfi-ocr-api-and-emacs-front-end-for-it/581/4 "2026-01-06T18:13:06Z")
I did find your use of Verify API interesting, though I have not used Emacs in decades. I did visit the Verify site, and when I tried to explore the developer account, I ended up with a mailbox full of sales emails. Also, I have seen some discussion of pdftotext in some other recent posts. I should have given you a thumbs up. πŸ‘