Skip the SaaS Tax — Self-Host TaxHacker for Receipts

Wave’s free receipt scanning is gone. On June 1, 2026, Wave locked OCR capture behind its $19/month Pro plan — or behind an $8/month add-on if you want just that feature on the free Starter tier. Every freelancer who depended on free Wave for expense capture woke up to a choice: pay the subscription tax, or find something else. TaxHacker is something else.

Why TaxHacker is the pick

TaxHacker is a self-hosted, MIT-licensed AI app built by indie developer vas3k. You run it on a cheap VPS via Docker Compose. You point it at an LLM. You upload receipts. It extracts vendor name, date, amount, line items, tax fields, and currency — then exports to structured CSV or Excel that any accountant or tax software can read. That’s the whole job.

The MIT license matters. You own the software outright. No seat fees, no usage caps, no vendor deciding one June morning that the feature you rely on now costs $8 extra. Fork it, modify it, run it until the internet falls apart. The repo sits at 6,750 GitHub stars with a last commit on 2026-09-21 and a last release on 2026-07-20 — actively maintained, not abandoned.

Concrete self-hosting cost:

• VPS: $5–10/month on Hetzner CX11 or DigitalOcean’s basic droplet; the Docker Compose stack runs comfortably on 1GB RAM
• LLM API (GPT-4o-mini): $0.15 per million input tokens, $0.60 per million output tokens — at ~1k–2k tokens per receipt, expect roughly $0.04–$0.15/month for 50–200 receipts
• LLM API ($0 option): You can avoid per-token API charges by running an Ollama-hosted local model; extraction accuracy is slightly lower than GPT-4o-mini for some receipts but handles standard documentation without issue

Setup takes about an hour if you’ve run Docker before. The project’s documentation is solid for a one-person open-source repo — the compose file works out of the box with PostgreSQL bundled.

What TaxHacker actually extracts per document: vendor name, line items, amounts, dates, tax fields, currency (170+ fiat currencies, 14 cryptocurrencies), with multi-currency historical conversion built in using the rate from the actual transaction date. If you work across currencies — common for freelancers with international clients — this matters more than you’d think. No SaaS receipt scanner at the $8–19/month tier handles crypto conversion.

The honest limitation: TaxHacker is an ingestion layer. It pulls structured data out of your receipts and exports it. It is not a general ledger. It does not do double-entry bookkeeping, bank feed sync, or invoicing. For those functions, pair it with Wave Starter — which remains free — and import the CSV exports. You get a complete, zero-subscription-cost bookkeeping setup: TaxHacker extracts, Wave Starter keeps the books.

Who should not use TaxHacker: freelancers who need everything in one interface, who want mobile-first scanning with no setup, or who find Docker genuinely intimidating. If any of those describe you, Wave Pro at $19/month is the honest answer. One tool, no terminal, receipt scanning plus books in one login.

Why not Wave Pro

Wave Pro is credible. For a freelancer who wants receipt scanning without leaving their browser, $19/month buys you mobile receipt scanning, bank feed integration, double-entry accounting, and invoicing in a single tool. That is a reasonable deal if your time is worth more than the subscription.

The problem is the trajectory. Wave’s free tier used to include receipt scanning. It doesn’t anymore. The Pro tier used to cost $16/month. It now costs $19/month. Paying $19/month for a feature that was free eighteen months ago feels like being renegotiated out of the product you chose. Nothing technically stops Wave from moving the next feature behind a higher tier next year.

The other concrete limitation: Wave’s mobile scanning accuracy is inconsistent. User reviews flag blurry-photo failures and extraction errors that require manual correction — entering amounts and tax lines by hand. At that point you’re not saving time versus a spreadsheet, you’re just paying for a UI. TaxHacker running GPT-4o-mini extracts more reliably than Wave’s current OCR for standard receipts.

Wave Starter — the free tier — remains genuinely useful as a general ledger paired with TaxHacker. Double-entry accounting, unlimited invoices, and basic reporting are all still free. The pairing works: TaxHacker handles extraction, Wave Starter handles the books. You pay for the VPS, nothing else.

Why not the rest

Zoho Books — The free tier exists but caps autoscans at 50/month. The Standard plan is $15/month billed yearly (or $20/month on monthly billing) — the entry price most sources quote. Standard raises the cap to 200 autoscans per month; extra scans cost $10 per 50 scans as a monthly add-on that expires after 90 days. For a freelancer processing receipt backlogs, Zoho’s one-document-at-a-time Autoscan interface is slower than batch extraction via TaxHacker. Cloud-only, so your financial documents live in Zoho’s infrastructure.

QuickBooks Online — Starts at $38/month. Receipt Snap works via web upload, mobile app, email forwarding, or Google Drive. It’s technically capable. But $38/month is the entry price for a full accounting suite with payroll infrastructure, class tracking, and accountant collaboration tools you will not use if all you need is receipt extraction. Hard to justify.

FreshBooks — Receipt scanning is not available on the $23/month Lite plan. You need Plus at $43/month to get expense receipt scanning via mobile. FreshBooks is built around invoicing — the receipt capture is a secondary feature on a secondary plan. You’d be paying $43/month for an invoicing tool with receipts bolted on. Wrong tool for the problem.

Xero — Starts at $25/month on the Early plan, which caps you at 20 invoices and 5 bills per month. Receipt capture runs through Hubdoc (now branded Smart Document Capture), bundled free across all Xero plans. Hubdoc extracts header-level data — vendor, amount, date — and is adequate for simple receipts. The issue: Xero’s Early plan caps make it restrictive for freelancers with any volume, and the extraction depth (no line items, no multi-currency historical conversion) is shallower than TaxHacker’s GPT-powered pipeline. Best for accountant-led workflows where your bookkeeper drives the Xero instance.

When to reconsider

If your receipt volume drops to near zero — say, you move to a flat-rate contractor arrangement with no expense reimbursements — the VPS cost stops making sense. At that point, Wave Starter with manual entry or a free-tier Zoho Books account handles it without infrastructure overhead.

If you grow past the point where you want to manage a VPS yourself — team of three or more, accountant relationship, need for integrated payroll — look at Xero’s Growing plan ($55/month) or QuickBooks Online. Both handle multi-user workflows and accountant collaboration that TaxHacker and Wave Starter can’t match. The self-hosted stack is optimized for one person who controls their own infrastructure. Scale changes that equation.

For now, if you’re a freelancer who can run a Docker container and is tired of paying SaaS subscriptions for features that used to be free: TaxHacker is the pick.