The short version: Most receipt scanners are company tools priced per employee, per month, for features one person will never use. If you are an individual, freelancer, or small business owner, the best app is the one that captures a receipt accurately, tracks your money in and out, and does not charge you like a finance department. That is what True Cost is built for, and below is how it stacks up against Adobe Scan, Expensify, Dext, and Zoho Expense on both features and price.
Work for yourself and you hit the same wall: how do you stay on top of expenses without turning bookkeeping into a second job? Paper receipts in a drawer and blurry photos in a cloud folder fall apart by tax season. You want one app that reads a receipt, files it correctly, tracks your mileage, and produces a clean report at tax time, without a per-seat subscription built for big teams.
Here is an honest breakdown of the main options in 2026, by what each one is really built for, what it does, and what it costs.
Features and Price, Side by Side
| App | Line Items | Mileage | Income | Price |
|---|---|---|---|---|
| Adobe Scan | ❌ | ❌ | ❌ | Free |
| Expensify | ❌ | ✅ | ❌ | $5–9 / user / mo |
| Dext | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | From $31 / mo |
| Zoho Expense | ✅ | ✅ | ❌ | Free for 3, then $3–8 / user / mo |
| True Cost | ✅ | ✅ | ✅ | 7-day trial, then $10/mo or $90/yr |
Read the pattern. Adobe Scan is free but does not track expenses at all. The cheaper trackers either skip the detail, since Expensify captures a total rather than line items, or bolt onto a heavier corporate suite like Zoho, and the one that matches the depth, Dext, costs roughly three times as much and is built for your accountant. And not one of them tracks the money coming in. So the real question is not which is cheapest, but which does the whole job for a fair, flat price, instead of charging per user or selling you a finance department you do not need. (Competitor prices are list rates as of mid-2026 and can change.)
1. Adobe Scan: the free document scanner
Plenty of self-employed people start with a free scanner like Adobe Scan. It uses OCR to turn a paper receipt into a tidy, searchable PDF, and for simple archiving it does that well. The catch is that it never reads the receipt as money: no line items, no tax split, no categories, no mileage. You still retype every figure into a spreadsheet later. It is free because it is a filing cabinet, not an expense tracker.
2. Expensify: the team expense platform
Expensify is the name most people know, and for good reason. It is powerful and widely trusted, scans receipts in over 160 currencies, tracks mileage, and runs the whole corporate loop of cards, approvals, and reimbursements. If you manage a team that submits expenses up a chain, it earns its keep.
So why not just use Expensify? Two things make it a different tool for an individual. First, it does less than it looks: SmartScan captures the header of a receipt, the merchant, date, and total, not the individual line items, and it tracks expenses only, never the income side. Second, it is built around US-style company travel and reimbursement, where tax is added on top or reclaimed later through a business VAT integration, rather than reading a tax-inclusive receipt the way it is printed in Singapore, Europe, or Australia. For a solo operator, much of what you pay for per user, the approvals, the corporate cards, the policy engine, is overhead you will never touch.
3. Dext: the accountant's pipeline
Formerly Receipt Bank, Dext is built to feed bookkeepers and accounting firms, and it is good at it: accurate line-item and tax extraction, a GPS mileage tracker, and a clean pipe into Xero, QuickBooks, or Sage. The cost reflects that audience. Business plans start around $31 a month, and the real payoff only appears once it is wired into accounting software and, often, a bookkeeper. It is a back-office tool for your accountant, not a simple app for watching your own money, and it does not track your income alongside your spend.
4. Zoho Expense: the business-suite module
If you already live in the Zoho ecosystem, Zoho Expense is a natural fit. It scans receipts, tracks mileage with GPS, handles multiple currencies and regional tax, and syncs into Zoho Books. There is even a free tier, though it caps you at 20 receipt scans a month and three users; past that it is about $3 to $8 per user, per month. The deeper trade-off is weight: it is built for business travel and reimbursement, with per-diems, travel policies, and approval rules, so as a standalone phone app it feels heavier and more corporate than an individual or small business needs just to snap a receipt.
5. True Cost: built for individuals and small businesses
True Cost is the one shaped around the person in this article rather than the finance department. Snap a receipt and its AI captures every line item as printed, plus the merchant, date, tax, tip, payment method, and currency, and files it into a category you can edit. It reads tax-inclusive receipts (GST or VAT baked into the price, as in Singapore, Europe, or Australia) as fluently as tax-exclusive ones, accounts for coin rounding, and flags a receipt only when the numbers genuinely do not add up. And it tracks income next to expenses, so you see money in and out in one place, not just what you spent.
Mileage is built in, mapping your route and distance and valuing each trip at a per-mile rate you set rather than a fixed national one. Reports export to PDF or CSV in a tap for taxes, clients, or claims. The price is a flat $10 a month, or $90 a year (about $7.50 a month), after a 7-day free trial, and it is the same whether you scan ten receipts or a thousand, with a Team plan that adds unlimited members for one flat fee instead of charging per seat. It is on the App Store now.
The Verdict
So which should you pick? If you run a team that needs approvals and corporate cards, Expensify or Zoho Expense are built for exactly that, priced per user. If your books run through an accountant, Dext is the cleanest pipe into them. If you only ever need a receipt saved as a PDF, Adobe Scan is free. But if you are an individual, freelancer, or small business owner who wants every line item captured, income and mileage tracked with your expenses, tax-inclusive receipts read correctly, and a tax-ready report from your phone, True Cost is the one shaped around you. It is not the cheapest sticker price, but for that job it is the best value.