News without the noise

Happy Hump day! In today's Leaderboard, we're talking about: a new tool to cancel unused subscriptions, a platform to ease your paperwork burden, and a news app that tries to cut through all the narratives. Let's dive in.

Sweet Lemon: Manage and cancel subscriptions that you don't use. 

Sweet Lemon has a promising approach to subscription management, but it feels a bit undercooked. It integrates with Slack, Notion, and GitHub—handy, though limited if you're after a complete view of your subscriptions. Setup was a bit rocky; I hit an error, which luckily I could fix due to my admin access permissions, but it’s a hurdle others might struggle with. Once inside, the lack of onboarding left me staring at a dashboard without clear next steps. It’s an interesting tool with potential, but it needs more polish to really help with the hassle of tracking unused licenses.

Koncile: Customizable OCR for your data extractions needs.

In Japan, so much is still processed on paper—and annoyingly, it often needs a digital backup too. From business receipts to visa applications and even buying a house, there's always paperwork to manage. Unfortunately, OCR tech doesn’t capture Japanese characters very well, so I end up manually entering every receipt into an Excel sheet for taxes each year. If Koncile works as promised, it could be a real lifesaver. Besides receipts, I can see it being helpful for business cards and other paper-to-digital conversions. My only question is, when will AI get “eyes” so I don’t even need to take a picture?

Particle: An easier way to keep up with the news. 

I was a big lover of Artifact — the news app built by the co-founders of Instagram. But since it joined the startup afterlife I’ve been on the hunt for a replacement. Particle is in the running for me so far. It has a diverse level of topics, breaks down stories into fairly concise summarys so I can spend less time trying to get the facts, and most importantly it presents otherwise polarizing topics in a fairly neutral setting minus all the narratives. I’m also a fan of how it uses AI. It allows you to ask questions about each story to get more context. It’s a cool addition and I like how it doesn’t try to steal the show.