I Built a Free Invoice OCR Chrome Extension — No Cloud, No Signup

Every freelancer knows the drill. A PDF invoice arrives. You open it, squint at the numbers, then manually type the vendor name, amounts, tax breakdowns, and registration IDs into a spreadsheet or accounting app. Repeat twenty times a month. Cloud OCR services like Dext (formerly Receipt Bank), Hubdoc, or Veryfi can automate this, but they start at $10-50/month, require uploading your financial documents to third-party servers, and often lock your data behind proprietary formats. I wanted something different: an invoice reader that runs entirely in the browser, processes everything locally, costs nothing, and works the moment you install it. So I built one as a Chrome extension. This article covers the technical decisions behind it: how to extract text from PDFs inside a Chrome extension, how to handle scanned invoices with in-browser OCR, how to parse unstructured invoice text into structured data with regex, and how to verify tax registration numbers against a government API in real