My AI Read a Receipt Wrong. It Didn't Misread It — It Made One Up.

I pointed my phone at a grocery receipt. The AI returned a store name, item list, and total. None of it was real. The store was wrong. The items were fabricated. The total didn't match anything on the paper. The model didn't misread the receipt — it hallucinated an entirely fictional one. Same image, different model, five seconds later: every item correct, store name right, total accurate to the penny. This is a story about vision models, receipts, and why I stopped paying for OCR APIs. The Problem I built an expense tracker that lets you scan receipts with your phone camera. Take a photo, the AI reads it, items get logged automatically. No typing. The OCR industry wants you to pay for this. Google Cloud Vision: $1.50 per 1,000 pages. AWS Textract: $1.50 per 1,000 pages. Azure Document Intelligence: $1 per 1,000 pages. For a personal expense tracker, that's a small number — but it's not zero, it's not local, and your receipt data leaves your machine. I wanted zero cost, zero cloud, and