SnipFast – Extract Highlighted Text from Physical Books

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SnipFast – Extract Highlighted Text from Physical Books

Hi HN, I built SnipFast - a tool that helps you extract important text from an image of a page. If you’ve ever highlighted sections in a physical book and wanted to save or organize them digitally, SnipFast can help. This came from my own frustration. I like to note down ideas when reading, but doing that from physical books was time-consuming. I looked for a tool to solve this, didn’t find one, so I built it. SnipFast lets you: - Automatically detect and extract highlighted text from a page photo (works with most highlighter pens and languages) - Click on sentences in the image to manually pick exactly what you want to copy It’s aimed at readers, students, researchers - basically anyone who annotates physical books and wants to keep those notes digitally. Under the hood, it uses a custom ML model trained on highlight detection. The app runs on a Kotlin backend with a Postgres database. You can try it for free. Signup is required, but it’s minimal. I offer some credits upfront so people can test it out. After that, there’s a small payment required. The goal is mainly to prevent abuse and to validate whether this is a tool people find valuable enough to pay for. The UI still needs work, and I’m mainly looking for feedback at this stage. I’d love to hear: does this solve a real problem for you? Was anything confusing? What would make it more useful? link: https://snipfa.st Thanks, Tom