Snap a photo of any receipt — Costco, Sprouts, Walmart, anywhere. CartLens reads every line item, identifies every product, and turns your everyday spending into insights you can actually act on.
📸 → 🤖 → 📊 Works in Telegram today. No bank logins. No card linking. Ever.
No app to learn. No accounts to link. No spreadsheets to maintain. If you can send a photo to a friend, you already know how to use CartLens.
Photograph your receipt and send it to the CartLens bot on Telegram — from the parking lot, the kitchen counter, or a week later. Crumpled, faded, and three-feet-long Costco receipts welcome.
CartLens extracts each line item and price, decodes cryptic register abbreviations ("KS ORG EGG LG" → Kirkland Signature Organic Large Eggs), and enriches every product with images, sizes, categories, and unit prices.
In seconds you get a beautiful, shareable link with the full itemized breakdown — plus price history, nearby price comparisons, and trend alerts. Share it with your household or keep it private.
Bank feeds see "COSTCO WHSE #1234 — $99.87." CartLens sees the eggs, the olive oil, and the fact that you're paying 31% more for it than in January. Line items are where the truth lives.
Register abbreviations become real products. Each line gets a product image, brand, package size, category, and normalized unit price — so "GV 2% MILK GAL" and "KS ORG MILK" are finally comparable.
CPI says 2.9%. But CPI doesn't shop where you shop or buy what you buy. CartLens builds an inflation index from your actual basket and tracks it against the official numbers — item by item, month by month.
For the items you buy most, CartLens compares your paid price against current prices at competitors near you — and tells you when switching a few staples to a different store actually pays for the gas.
Every receipt you snap quietly builds a living picture of your spending: by category, by store, by brand, by month. Set soft budgets and CartLens nudges you in Telegram before the month gets away from you.
Every receipt becomes a clean, private link — perfect for splitting a Costco run with a roommate, settling "who bought the dog food," or just having a searchable archive of everything you've ever purchased.
"I sent one Costco receipt from the parking lot and got back a link that knew more about my shopping than I did. The olive-oil price alert alone changed where I buy it."
"My bank says 'Walmart $214.' CartLens says which 31 things that was, what they cost per ounce, and that my snack budget is the real problem. Rude. Accurate, but rude."
"The Personal Inflation Index is the feature I didn't know I needed. CPI says 3%; my basket says 7%. Now I know exactly which items are doing it — and what to swap."
"It caught a duplicate scan at the register that I never would have noticed. The app paid for the year in one beep."
"My partner and I both snap to one household. Splitting the wholesale runs takes one tap now instead of a Sunday-night spreadsheet argument."
"No bank login was the whole reason I tried it. A week later the shrinkflation alert told me my 'same' cereal box had lost 1.4 oz since March. I felt seen and betrayed simultaneously."
Start free. Upgrade when CartLens has already saved you more than it costs — most members get there on their first switch list.
No — and you never will. CartLens works entirely from receipt photos you choose to send. We believe the most private expense tracker is one that only ever sees what you show it.
We don't sell your data, we don't show ads, and we don't broker your purchase history to consumer-insights firms. Only you can see your data unless you explicitly share the receipt link with someone. Our entire business model is a small subscription, nothing else, and you can export or delete everything at any time.
Telegram is the fastest way to start today — search for @CartLensBot, tap start, send a photo. WhatsApp, iMessage via email gateway, and direct web upload are on the public roadmap. Every channel feeds the same account and history.
Send it anyway. CartLens handles wrinkles, thermal-paper fading, fold shadows, and famously long warehouse-club receipts. If a line can't be read confidently, we mark it for a one-tap fix instead of guessing silently.
We track the prices of the specific items you actually rebuy, weight them by how much of your spending they represent, and compute your basket's price change over time — then chart it against headline CPI and grocery CPI so you can see how your reality compares to the average.
From a blend of public store pricing data and the anonymized, aggregated receipt prices of CartLens members near you — which means comparisons reflect shelf reality, not just advertised specials. Individual receipts are never shared or identifiable.
The receipt in your pocket right now knows whether you're winning or losing against inflation. Send it to CartLens and find out in ten seconds.
📸 Message @CartLensBot to begin