SideGig AI: Your Privacy-First Financial Assistant for Freelancers

This is a submission for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge Week 2: Side Hustle

What I Built

I built SideGig AI, a privacy-first financial assistant for freelancers and small business owners.

Managing receipts, invoices, and expenses manually takes time. SideGig AI aims to simplify this process by helping users extract invoice details, categorize expenses, detect potential duplicate invoices, visualize spending, and export financial records as CSV files.

The goal is to make financial management easier for freelancers without requiring expensive AI subscriptions.

Potential users include freelance developers, designers, content creators, and small business owners who want to spend less time on paperwork.

Demo

Screen Recording 2026-10-18 195356.mp4 - Google Drive

drive.google.com

Code

NavadeepKothakula / sidegig-aipro

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SideGig AI 💼🤖

A Privacy-First, Open-Weight AI Finance Assistant for Freelancers, Creators & Side Hustlers. Built for the Hacktoberfest Open-Source AI Challenge — Week Theme: Side Hustle.

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🚀 Overview & Vision

Freelancers, independent developers, creative contractors, and students juggling side hustles receive bills, invoices, receipts, and payment receipts scattered across emails, PDFs, screenshots, and paper scans. Manually transcribing numbers into spreadsheets is slow, prone to errors, and tedious. At the same time, commercial AI accounting software often requires expensive monthly subscriptions and uploads private personal financial documents to centralized cloud servers.

SideGig AI is designed from the ground up around a zero-cloud-fees, local-first, privacy-by-default architecture:

1. 100% In-Browser Document Extraction: Parse native text from PDFs using PDF.js and extract text from receipts/images using in-browser Tesseract.js OCR. No document files are ever sent to external cloud APIs.
2. Deterministic Financial Accuracy: Uses integer minor units (cents) to mathematically…

View on GitHub

How I Built It

I built SideGig AI using React, TypeScript, Vite, and Tailwind CSS.

The project uses open-source document-processing tools such as Tesseract.js for OCR and PDF.js for PDF text extraction. IndexedDB provides local data persistence, while Recharts powers the expense analytics dashboard.

The AI architecture is designed to support local inference through Ollama and a compatible open-weight language model. This allows AI-powered expense categorization and financial insights without depending on a paid AI API.

For essential operations such as calculating expenses, filtering transactions, and exporting reports, the application can use deterministic application logic.

Why Does Open Innovation Matter?

Open innovation makes it possible to build useful AI-powered tools without making proprietary AI services a mandatory dependency.

Privacy: Local-first storage and local model inference can help users keep sensitive financial documents on their own computers.

Affordability: Running an open-weight model locally can eliminate per-request hosted AI charges, making frequent use more affordable.

Flexibility: Developers can experiment with different models and adapt the application to specific business needs.

Less vendor lock-in: A modular AI architecture gives developers more control over model selection and future changes.

For freelancers and small businesses, these advantages matter. They need affordable tools that solve real problems without introducing unnecessary costs or exposing sensitive information.

SideGig AI explores how open-source software and open-weight AI can make financial organization more accessible.