A document scanner that never uploads your paperwork
How we built Scanly to turn paper into sharp, searchable PDFs entirely on-device - OCR and all - so private documents never leave the phone, for one payment.
The problem
Think about what actually goes through a document scanner: tax forms, IDs, contracts, medical letters, receipts. It is almost a definition of the paperwork you least want sitting on someone else's server - and yet the common pattern is exactly that, with the extra insult of a monthly subscription to scan your own documents.
We wanted Scanly to do everything a good scanner does - crisp edges, real OCR, clean PDFs - without any of it leaving the phone, and to charge for it once instead of forever.
Constraints
Three rules shaped the build:
- Everything local, including OCR. The moment a scanner uploads "just for text recognition," the privacy promise is gone. The optical character recognition had to run on-device like everything else.
- The output has to be genuinely good. A private scanner nobody's proud of is useless. Edge detection, perspective correction, and PDF sharpness had to hold up against anything.
- One payment, owned for good. A free app with a single small unlock - no recurring charge for a utility.
A scanner is the last app that should phone home. The right place to process your private paperwork is the device already in your hand.
What we built
Scanly captures a document, receipt, ID, or whiteboard, cleans it up with automatic edge detection and perspective correction, and turns it into a sharp, searchable PDF. You can sign, organize, and run OCR - all on the iPhone. Because the text recognition is on-device, a scanned document is searchable without any of its contents being sent off for processing.
The flow is deliberately fast: point, capture, and you have a clean multi-page PDF ready to share, with everything filed locally.
The tech
A native iOS app built on Apple's on-device vision and text-recognition capabilities, with local PDF generation and storage. There's no server component in the scanning path at all. Monetization is a single $2.99 Pro unlock through StoreKit - the app's revenue never depends on touching the documents.
The outcome
Scanly shipped to the App Store as a fast, private, pay-once scanner: OCR and processing on-device, sharp searchable PDFs, and no subscription to keep your own paperwork. It's a small, everyday utility built the way sensitive-document tools should be - local by default.