This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 3: Slow and Steady
ReturnRakshak: Never Miss a Return Window Again 🛡️
What I Built
Ever bought something online and forgotten when the return window closes? Or struggled to find a warranty invoice months later?
Meet ReturnRakshak — a privacy-first AI invoice assistant designed to reduce the mental overhead of tracking product returns and warranties.
The idea is simple: upload an invoice, extract the important details with AI, review the results, and keep track of important deadlines without manually entering everything.
The goal is to make everyday purchase management a little less stressful and let people spend less time organizing documents.
Demo
Project 2.mp4 - Google Drive
drive.google.com
Code
🔗 GitHub Repository — devrittik/return-rakshak
How I Built It
ReturnRakshak is designed around a modular, privacy-first architecture.
The planned technology stack includes:
- Next.js and TypeScript for the application.
- Tailwind CSS for a responsive, installable PWA experience.
- PDF.js and Tesseract.js for extracting text from digital and scanned invoices.
- Open-weight language models for converting extracted text into structured invoice information.
- SQLite/Turso with Drizzle ORM for storing structured product, policy, and reminder data.
A key design decision is to avoid permanently storing original invoices. Documents are processed temporarily, and only the necessary structured information is retained after user confirmation.
AI handles information extraction; deterministic application logic handles deadline calculations. Missing or uncertain policy details should be reviewed rather than guessed.
Why Does Open Innovation Matter?
Privacy-sensitive documents shouldn't require users to depend entirely on a proprietary AI service.
Open-weight models and local inference offer the possibility of processing invoice data without sending it to a third-party AI API. They also give developers more control over model selection, deployment, and experimentation.
Open innovation makes it possible to build useful everyday tools while keeping implementation choices transparent and adaptable.
My Agent Session
Built with AI-assisted development.
Add your DevRelay session link here if you recorded and saved one. Otherwise, remove this section before publishing.
The Lazy Payoff
The goal is to replace repetitive manual entry with a simple workflow: upload, review, confirm, and track.
Instead of repeatedly searching through invoices or trying to remember expiry dates, users can keep important purchase information organized in one place.
The time saved will depend on the number of purchases and the quality of invoice extraction. I plan to evaluate this using sample invoices rather than inventing a time-saving figure.
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